GOM Player

GOM Player

GOM Player, using default skin
Developer(s) Gretech
Initial release January 7, 2003 (2003-01-07)
Stable release 2.2.69.5227 (March 26, 2015 (2015-03-26)) [±]
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.gomlab.com

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.

Supported formats

GOM Player can play following multimedia formats:

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:

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

References

  1. 1 2 "Specifications". GOMlab. Gretech. Retrieved 20 December 2013.
  2. ↑ "GOM Player". Softpedia. SoftNews. 3 April 2013. Retrieved 28 June 2013.
  3. ↑ What is GOMTV Streamer? Archived November 5, 2010 at the Wayback Machine
  4. ↑ "Two in Three GOM Player Users Watch Porn". The Chosun Ilbo. 2007-07-20. Archived from the original on 2007-08-22. Retrieved 2007-07-20.
  5. ↑ Ropelato, Jerry (2007-07-20). "Internet Pornography Statistics". Internet Filter Software Review. Top Ten Reviews. Retrieved 2010-05-02.
  6. ↑ 곰플레이어, 재생파일 모니터링 안한다! [GOM Player doesn't monitor played files!]. inews24.com (in Korean). 2007-07-22. Retrieved 2007-10-31.

External links

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