Need windows video player with seek preview feature

This is the solution that worked best for me: there was a video stream I had to play in VLC because RTMP is/was poorly supported in my preferred media player, MPCHC (which has this feature builtin to the numpad keys). This stream had both vertical and horizontal letterboxes and when I needed to zoom it, I realized the thing.

Just use the crop function: if you leave default aspect ratio options the video will scale to fit the window, thus giving the zooming effect!

To access cropping you need to first open the Tools menu, then click Effects and Filters or just use the default CTRL+E shortcut.

Then you need to select the Video Effects tab, and navigate to the Crop sub-tab: play with the cropping values to achieve the desired zoom level.

Final Remarks: You can fine-tune it during play and you have pixel-level control. Enjoy!

VLC or WMP can't.

(I see you used ffmpeg to remove rotational metadata, good that it can do that, and coincidentally, also, usefully, ffplay can choose whether or not to obey rotational metadata, with the -noautorotate and -autorotate options that take no parameters are are about whether or not to obey rotational metadata). So e.g. ffplay blah.mp4 -noautorotate or ffplay blah.mp4 -autorotate(default)