Version 1.60b of the Fractal eXtreme package is a significant upgrade to the Fractal eXtreme Zoom Movie Player. The new version number for the Zoom Movie Player alone is 2.01.
The most significant addition to the zoom movie player is OpenGL support. OpenGL is a 3D graphics standard for fast, high quality rendering of 3D graphics. Most computers purchased from 1998 or later have a 3D graphics card that supports OpenGL. If you have such a card you can choose the OpenGL option in the Fractal eXtreme Movie Player and get much faster, higher quality results.
Another important addition, which ties in with OpenGL, is support for 24-bit (true-colour) zoom movies. This allows display of anti-aliased zoom movies, for much higher quality results. In order to get best results we recommend OpenGL acceleration for displaying 24-bit zoom movies (support for creating anti-aliased zoom movies arrived in version 1.80 of Fractal eXtreme).
Zoom movie spinning was added. This makes for a very psychedelic experience if you stare at it too long at full screen. This option requires OpenGL.
Ease-in and ease-out was added. This means that when the movie is about to change playback directions it slows down and then smoothly accelerates in the new direction.
In point and out point marking was added so that you can highlight an interesting segment of a movie and watch it repeatedly.
Colour cycling, bilinear filtering, various convenience features, and some bugs were fixed.
Many changes were made to improve the zoom movie quality, and the net effect is that you play an antialiased zoom movie back at full screen at a steady frame rate - easily possible on a PC bought in 1999 or later - the quality is flawless and the illusion of fractal motion is perfect.
The Fractal eXtreme Zoom Movie player was upgraded to allow cycling of colours while playing back zoom movies. This feature had been frequently requested. The ability to specify the frame rate when saving zoom movies as .avi files was added also.