It's a great program, but the developers have repeatedly stated that they have no plans to port it to OS X. I even offered to pay them or to do it for them. It's a free program, what do they have to lose? Sheesh.
Anyway, I've tried every Mac movie player I could find. VLC showed some promise, but it handled subtitles very poorly. It would say that it could automatically detect them, but in my experience, I had to redefine a path to the subtitle file every time. Also, I have some avi files that were semi-corrupted. Most of the file would play fine, but at certain parts it would freeze and kill both GOM and VLC.
What to do, what to do...
After much searching, swearing and grumbling about the program tht didn't do what I needed, or even what they claimed to do, I discovered Chroma.
Chromaplayer is an incredible little app. It does fullscreen (great if you don't feel like shelling out for Quicktime Pro), plays almost any file type imaginable has fantastic subtitle support and handles thos ebroken AVI's better than anything else I've ever seen.
A file that was almost unwatchable on VLC and actually killed Windows Vista once played in Chroma with only a few hiccups. Instead of crashing like VLC or GOM, I'd get the little "I'm thinking, I'm thinking!" spinning beach ball for about 10 seconds, and boom! It would start plying again, just having skipped a few seconds!
I did have to go out and find the A53 audio codec to play a few files, but other than that, it's built in stuff is incredible.
In GOMplayer, I had to fiddle around with the controls to turn on subtitles, but then it automatically detected them. Subtitles in VLC was a nightmare, but in Chroma, ah, Chroma... I had just opened a file and was about to start looking for the subtitle controls and suddenly, english just showed up at the bottom of the screen! It found the subtitle file without even being asked to.
All in all, I am very impressed, I thought I'd never find anything to match GOMplayer, but Chroma does lmost everything it can, and some things better.
I do wish Chroma would play numbered movie files sequentially like GOM. It's a pain to exit fullscreen and open the next movie in a sequence each time, but that's my only real complaint in terms of functionality.
Now there are plenty of free movie players out there, but none that do subtitles so well and can handle all my movies. Apparently, you have to pay for that is you use a Mac (GOMplayer!!! Port it!!!), but the cost is not too bad. $22 US Dollars buys you a lifetime of updates. So, maybe my sequential files gripe will be fixed soon, and if so, then this will become the perfect movie player on any platform.
I would have posted an image showing subtitles in action, but I don't feel like getting sued. The media companies are getting a little lawyer happy these days. Rest assured, I paid for my movies, but some of them are in Korean and I don't speak Korean. Yet.
Pros: Supports almost every file type imaginable, unparalleled subtitle support, handles broken AVI's no other player can, lifetime of upgrades included in price.
Cons: Doesn't play numbered files sequentially like GOMplayer, $22 USD is a bit much. Unless you REALLY need these features you can find a good free player.
Bottom line: Yeah, 22 bucks feels a bit steep, but if, like me you've been screaming for these features and have been frustrated by the freeware and shareware out there, then it is SOOOOOOOOOO worth it! Also, you can't bet the upgrade policy!
4.5/5 stars!
Get it here! http://www.chromaplayer.com
2 comments:
You should take a look at this page http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/projects.html
At the bottom where are the blacklisted mplayer projects you should find a link to gomplayer... ;) Use mplayer, it is the best media mplayer in the universe... ; )
I used MPlayer once. My experience may have been unique, but it bogged down my system until it was nearly unusable. It is entirely possible that they were hacked when I wad downloading it, but I never heard anything about it.
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