OK, I'm sold. I'm going to be setting up a paypal account in a few minutes so that I can purchase the full version of Zoomplayer (the one that permits DVD playback).

I used the free version to rewatch part of Dai Mahou Touge again. That series really is good; it's scandalous that no one has licensed it yet. I'd love to see a sequel. It feels like there's a lot of juice left in the concept -- at least 8 more episodes worth, at the very least.

Mostly what I watched were the two sub-episodes featuring Pyun and Potaro, Punie's kid sisters. There are a lot of really good things in this show, but they're the best of the lot.

With its default settings, full screen playback looked like crap with Zoomplayer. I did some looking around and discovered that it's possible to choose a different renderer. It had defaulted to something called "VMR7", but I looked in the documentation and the prefered choice seems to be "VMR9 Windowless". Having done that, there's another menu which currently says "Haali Video Renderer". Opening that one is a terrifying experience because on this machine it lists a couple hundred choices. 27 of them are from Cyberlink. I didn't count them, but it looks like there's about 50 from Nero.

Probably if I knew which one to choose, one of the Cyberlink entries would be the best. But I'm afraid to mess with it.

Having chosen VMR9, full screen playback of the Dai Mahou Touge looks better, but still a bit rough. It isn't as clean as PowerDVD.

Like all semi-pro software, the documentation suffers. It only took me a couple of minutes to figure out how to change the default destination director for frame grabs, but it took about fifteen minutes to figure out how to do a frame grab. No matter how hard I tried I could not locate that in the help file I downloaded.

Eventually, I noticed in the player setup frames there was a choice which listed all the hot keys. I copied that and pasted it into Notepad, and then searched for "capture" and discovered that you do it with Alt-F. Hokay...

There are a ridiculous number of preset hot keys. Every alpha, every alt-alpha, every shift-alpha, and every control-alpha, and also Home, PgUp, PgDn, End, comma, period, and a swarm of others. The vast majority of them are for things I'd never want to do. I gather it's possible to change those; eventually I will get annoyed.

I'm used to using "p" to capture frames, and PgUp to go back 10 seconds, and PgDn to go forward 10 seconds. I'd like to set those up -- but it ain't urgent, and maybe it would be better for me to just get used to the defaults.

Anyway, now to go play paypal.

UPDATE: Two surprises.

First, you don't need to have a Paypal account to use Paypal to buy things. They're serving as a credit card processor now. I wish I'd known that; I set up an account first and now I wish I hadn't. (I wonder if I can tell Paypal to get rid of it?)

Second:

Your registration is now being processed, this may take up to 72 hours (usually under 24 hours).

 Alas. I'm used to buying things online and using them within minutes.

UPDATE: One of the reasons that the video renderer matters is that it affects frame capture. Some of the renderers disable capture entirely. Cool, huh? That was why I chose "VMR9 Windowless": the documentation said it was the one most friendly for people who want to take frame grabs.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at 12:31 PM | Comments (17) | Add Comment
Post contains 611 words, total size 4 kb.