I have just downloaded it for trial. Could not use the demo : it says "trial period is over". Bad sign.

After bringing this "home" to try on my mac, I was very disappointed. Right at the start it states that it plays matroska and has a better method of displaying subtitles. Funny, "out of the box" it couldn't play ANY matroska file. It kept trying to send me to web pages (and without an internet connection on that mac, that's not possible) for plug-ins. If it has to search for a plug-in to even play a matroska file, that it CANNOT play a matroska file and should not state that it can. It should say, "after hunting for dozens of plug-ins it might be able to play matroska files."
Even playing basic quicktime supported stuff it had problems, like continuously showing the beachball and preventing any interaction. Found out this was due to it's literally unending attempts to phone-home for something (again no internet connection, and even so, it shouldn't be trying to infinitely call home for anything -- is this installed spyware or improperly implemented logging/registration and update checks?).
Even after finding and loading a couple EXTRA codecs (including Perian a known conflict problem generator) it still couldn't play matroska. Of the five files I provided, the audio in all was choppy, the best video I got played only 1 single frame on average every 20 seconds. And the subtitles are worse than VLCs by all regards, they were soft and transparent, very difficult to read even on a still image.
VLC works better and faster, and though I couldn't actually get Chroma to crash (like VLC does), locking itself from interaction with a 1-2 minute beachball display is actually worse than a crash, which can be recovered with an instant re-launch.
The ONLY reason I would ever use this is if they can actually write an efficient matroska code set for it, so that I can actually watch matroska files (needed for many newer fansubs). Otherwise I'll stay with VLC, which, while not able to efficiently work with matroska, actually works faster than this. Heck for basic Xvid, VLC works without skipping frames while my computer is doing many other things concurrently, like video compression, downloading, burning DVDs, AND compiling code. Chroma couldn't even play the matroska files, when that was it's ONLY ltask.
(QT Player, I gave up on 2 system updates back, when opening many videos took up to 5-10 minutes, they played fine after, but taking that long to open, somebody at Apple should have been fired.)

After years of using VLC as my video player of choice I came upon Chroma Player. This is how a video player for the mac platform should look and act like. Used it for the full 15-day trial period and never had a crash. Much more stable than VLC but the best part is how it renders subtitles using the native resolution of the monitor instead of that of the video file (like VLC). The result is crisp text that doesn't strain yor eyes. Also try using the transparent background subtitle style (the animation of the text box is wonderful). I love Chroma and use it a lot so I wrote a Sofa Control script for that (it's in the new version of Sofa Control).
I only hope the next versions will add playlist support. If you like me are anal about type (and if you're using a mac you should be) and view a lot of movies with subtitles then Chroma is the player for you.

This apps interface is TOP notch... in theory. To bad they didn't back it up with ANY kind of functionality.

It's color is off, and there's not preference to change it. When you skip forward, the audio gets thrown out of sync with the video. And then it freezes up and wont respond. And I was running it on new stable hardware.

I tested it with AVI's only, it was preformed SO POORLY I didn't bother with any other format. This app needs ALOT of work before it'd be worth money. And even then I would pay maybe $5 tops. Maybe. As is, I wouldn't use it for free. In the end, it's pretty to look at, but no fun to use.

Don't bother. VLC, MPlayer, and good ol' Quicktime (with the DivX plugin) are where it's at.

My sister has an iMac G3 graphite with an internal slot loading cd burner and an external DVD burner running Tiger.

It would be nice if Chroma Player would allow her to play dvds from her external DVD Burner.