Google has confirmed that it’s future operating system Chrome OS will have an integrated media player that will offer  basic codec support , so that users can directly play audio or video files from Gmail or from USB drives or other media devices.

In an interview with Ars Technica, Matthew Papakipos, the lead engineering director for the Chrome OS project, shared that Chrome OS will have a complete media player that approximates the functionality of Windows Media Player.

Another big aspect to what we’re doing is we’re integrating a whole media player into Chrome and into Chrome OS. People often get confused about this, and it’s a fairly subtle but important point. Because in a sense what we’re doing is integrating the equivalent of Windows Media Player into Chrome itself.

So it seems that Chrome OS is heading in the right direction, although Chrome OS will be based, but every user will not always be connected to the internet.So users also need to be able to play videos, MP3s, PDFs and other stuff when they’re offline.