Chroma player 2006.5 review
DownloadChroma player is a movie player optimized for playing feature movies, no matter if it's DVDs, MPEG, QuickTime, DivX AVI's, XviD or Windows Media files.
|
|
Chroma player is a movie player optimized for playing feature movies, no matter if it's DVDs, MPEG, QuickTime, DivX AVI's, XviD or Windows Media files.
It contains built-in codecs for MPEG4, DivX, XviD, 3ivx, MS-MPEG4v1 and MS-MPEG4v2. It plays QuickTime just like QuickTime Player. It plays Windows Media WMV's with Flip4Mac's components. It does AVI subtitles. It plays DVDs. It has windowed, fullscreen and overlay presentations.
This is not a ported application or front end for some command line tool; Chroma is a from ground up a 100% native Mac OS X application that looks and feels like a Mac application should. It's built on the QuickTime media library with its excellent audio synchronisation and full support for all QuickTime movies, and adds proper AVI support that QuickTime never had.
This is what you've always wanted QuickTime Player to be.
Here are some key features of "Chroma player":
Excellent support for playing AVI movies
Chroma has improved support for the common AVI format, along with several codecs commonly found in AVI movies, and plays AVI files alot better than QuickTime Player. With Chroma, there is no need to fix or convert any files before playing.
Built-in codecs for formats like DivX, 3ivx, XviD and MPEG4 encoded movies
DivX, 3ivX, XviD and MPEG4 are all codecs commonly found in AVI movies, as well as some QuickTime movies. Chroma has built-in support to play these common formats, as well as several legacy codecs.
External codecs can be installed to for example support Windows Media (WMV and ASF) files, WMV3 codecs, MPEG2 video or AC3 audio. See our Codecs section for pointers to plug-in codecs.
Subtitle support in several common formats
Chroma can read several of the common subtitle formats. If you have a subtitle file for the movie, by simply placing the subtitle file next to the movie file will cause Chroma to automatically recognize the subtitle file and load it.
Current supported subtitle formats are SubRip (.srt), SubStation Alpha (.ssa and .ass), SubViewer (.sv1, .sv2 and .sub), SAMI (.smi) and MicroDVD (.sub).
Chroma uses the world-class text rendering engine built into Mac OS X for displaying subtitles. Watch subtitles in Korean, Hebrew, Thai, Chinese, Polish or any other language supported by Mac OS X.
The subtitles can be presented as white text on a black background, text with a drop shadow or the DVD style outlined text.
Built-in DVD player
You can watch your DVD's in Chroma. Chroma will give you full "scrubber" access to the entire DVD and not just chapters and titles. You can also use the IntelliAspect feature on DVDs to remove the black letterbox-bars. The DVD can automatically jump to the DVD menu on start to skip trailers and ads.
Chroma can also play directly from a VIDEO_TS directory.
Perfect audio synchronization
Chroma is designed to utilize the full capabilities of the QuickTime framework. QuickTime is a very capable media framework and has advanced capabilities for framerate adjustments and audio synchronization. Chroma uses this, and generally excels over most other players in never losing audio synchronization even while playing demanding movies.
Fullscreen mode
Naturally, Chroma can display your movies in "fullscreen". If you're not a fan of those black bars (known as "letterbox"), try the IntelliAspect feature.
Overlay mode
Chroma has an overlay or "Picture-In-Picture" feature which presents the movie in a small square in a corner of your screen, on top of your regular desktop. You can continue working while leisurely watching the movie.
IntelliAspect
IntelliAspect allows you to use your entire screen in fullscreen mode instead of creating a "letterbox". This works by automatically cropping away part of the frame and adjusting the aspect ratio of the movie so the frame fills your whole screen, without cropping out any of the action. If you have a widescreen monitor, this works on square TV content too.
AdaptiveQuality
AdaptiveQuality will make adjustments to the rendering quality of the movie depending on viewing conditions. This will allow even low-end computers to watch large movies, and lowers the CPU requirements in overlay mode so you can keep working while playing a movie.
Stability
Chroma is a well-designed modern multithreaded application which takes advantage of many Mac OS X only features like QuickTime, ATSUI text rendering, Cocoa and Quartz.
AppleRemote support
If you have an AppleRemote infrared remote control, you can use it to control Chroma.
Supports Mac OS X 10.2+ with QuickTime 6.5+
Don't have the very latest Mac OS X? No problem, Chroma supports anything later than Mac OS X 10.2. Not all features are available to all environments; for example, the DVD playing requires Mac OS X 10.3 or later.
Chroma will automatically sense the capabilities of your operating system and adjusts accordingly.
And more
Then there's Finder drag'n'drop, scrollwheel scrubbing, switching codecs while playing, autoplay, autofullscreen, multiscreen support, ...
Limitations:
15 days trial.
Requirements:
QuickTime 6.5 or later.
Chroma player 2006.5 search tags