Preview release None [±] Website player.gomlab.com Initial release 7 January 2003 Type Media player | License Adware (Ad-supported) Developers Gretech Corporation Platforms x86-32 (32 bit Intel x86) | |
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Stable release 2.3.10.5266 (December 19, 2016; 2 months ago (2016-12-19)) [±] Available in Japanese, English, Chinese, Korean, Russian | ||
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.
Contents
The word gom (곰) means "bear" in Korean, and as such GOM Player uses a bear's paw as its icon.
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.
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. This is in line with South Korea being allegedly the greatest spender per capita on pornography, even though local production of pornography is illegal. 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, and that only the explicit installation of the Metrix survey software enabled that monitoring to be done.