GOM Player
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GOM Player, using default skin
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| Developer(s) | Gretech |
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| Initial release | January 7, 2003 |
| Stable release | 2.2.69.5227 (March 26, 2015) [±] |
| Preview release | None [±] |
| Operating system | Windows 2000 and later[1] |
| Platform | IA-32 |
| Available in | English, Russian, Korean, Japanese, Chinese (Traditional and Simplified) |
| Type | Media player |
| License | Adware Ad-supported[2] |
| Website | player |
GOM Player (short for Gretech Online Movie Player) is a media player for Windows, developed by the Gretech Corporation of South Korea. Its main features include the ability to play some broken media files and find missing codecs using a codec finder service.[1]
The word gom (곰) means "bear" in Korean, and as such GOM Player uses a bear's paw as its symbol.
Contents
Supported formats
GOM Player can play following multimedia formats:
- ASF/MP3/AVI/Ogg files on an HTTP Streaming connection
- Via DirectShow: AVI, WMV, ASF, MP3, MP4, Matroska, 3GP, Google Video, Flash Video, VOB, Ogg, OGM, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Part 2, MJPEG, H.263, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, Vorbis, AMR, QCELP, EVRC, MSVIDC
- Via RealPlayer or Real Alternative: RealMedia
- Via QuickTime or QuickTime Alternative: QuickTime File Format
- Audio CD (requires Windows 2000 or Windows XP)
- DVD, Video CD, SVCD
The player can play incomplete, broken or damaged AVI files by skipping bad frames and rebuilding the file's index when necessary. GOM Player also supports peer-to-peer video streaming through an official add-on called GOMTV Streamer.[3]
Subtitles
The latest version of GOM Player supports the following subtitle formats:
- Unicode Text Subtitles
- SAMI (.smi)
- SubRipText (.srt), MicroDVD (.sub), SMIL/RealText
- SubStation Alpha (.ssa), Advanced SubStation Alpha (.ass)
- VOBsub (.sub + .idx)
- Embedded subtitles of ASF, MKV, OGM
Codec finder
Another significant feature of GOM Player is that where it can't play the audio or video of a media file natively, it will try to find an appropriate external codec which will play that file format, using the format's GUID, a unique identifier for the required codec. On finding a match, it will direct the user to a webpage where the codec can be downloaded and installed.
Popularity in South Korea
GOM Player is South Korea's most popular media player. As of July 2007, it had 21.3 million users, compared to 5.4 million users of Microsoft's Windows Media Player.
A survey of usage over a single week by Metrix, an internet survey company, found that 69.8% of users watched pornography, 43.2% watched cinematic movies, 29.6% watched television dramas, 21.8% watched variety shows, 11% watched cartoons, and 7% watched music videos.[4] This is in line with South Korea being allegedly the greatest spender per capita on pornography, even though local production of pornography is illegal.[5] Gretech disputes the credibility of this report.
Metrix obtained the survey data from 12,000 internet users who agreed to voluntarily install a monitoring tool. Only file names were used to categorize the media files included in the survey.
Gretech points out that media files played by GOM Player are not monitored,[6] and that only the explicit installation of the Metrix survey software enabled that monitoring to be done.
See also
- Comparison of video codecs
- Comparison of audio player software
- Comparison of video player software
- List of codecs
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ What is GOMTV Streamer?[dead link][dead link]
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
