Chameleo: New Open-Source Video Player

A Korean software company called NomadConnection has released Chameleo, a pretty-looking open-source video player with a focus on extensibility and widgets. The software, based on GStreamer and other open-source projects, supports a wide variety of codecs.

Chameleo doesn’t come pre-packaged with any content but will play a channel of local BitTorrent downloads or anything else on your desktop. What it does come with is a variety of sample widgets, giving video watchers the ability to take screen captures, blog what they’re watching, use video tags and subtitles, open new files, and browse the web. Embedded below are a couple of videos showing how the widgets work. (By the way, Joost also welcomes widget developers, but its platform and its media library are not so open.)

capture widget for chameleo from KyoungJune Eee on Vimeo.

[chameleo]Blog from chameleotj on Vimeo.

NomadConnection CTO Kwang Yul Seo told NewTeeVee that his company plans to release a Linux version of Chameleo this week and a Mac version in June. In our testing, the software was a huge resource hog, but he promised us this would be fixed with a new release coming this Friday.