The Best video-player apps for your Android Device!
Smartphones are getting bigger and bigger. More importantly, displays are getting sharper. In 2014, Full HD displays are becoming the norm. This is excellent news for people who want to watch content on the go. Whether it’s Movies, music videos or whatever floats your boat.
If you like steaming videos over the internet, Youtube is the best option. But what if you want to view content stored locally on your device? What you need is a video player app. There are many available on the Play Store; some great, some good and some, well, not so good. Here, we pick out some of the most versatile and popular ones, to give you the facts on what make them worth your time.
Each of these offer a broad selection of file-formats in terms of compatibility, so we will try to look at other elements too, such as design, ease-of-navigation and any stand-out features.
MoBoPlayer
MoBoPlayer is a perennially popular video player app, and for good reason.
It first scans storage memories and then puts all the videos in one place. You can have the videos sorted out for your needs such as movies, shows etc. One tap can change the view to include everything on a single screen.One of the main selling points of this video player is that it will support pretty much any file-format you throw at it, without the need to convert it first. It also offers separate codec downloads in case you do experience compatibility issues.
However, where MoboPlayer really sets itself apart is through the desktop-like floating window feature. So if you need to dart out and check a quick email or text, tap the home button and the video will shrink, letting you drag it across the screen to an appropriate position while you do your thing. MoboPlayer isn’t perfect though. Getting it to resume automatically from a previously paused/stopped point isn’t a consistent experience. Sometimes you can hit pause, go away and do other things, come back and kick off from where you left it. Other times, however, it will play from the start again.
Overall though, it’s a great player that performs consistently well in terms of playback and video quality, and is easy on the eye to boot.
MX Player
One of the very famous app’s of video playing in market for a reason of course easy to use and UI is handy.
MX player has a folder view as all of the video players but misses out on the “View all” function. It’s not a deal breaker though. You can resume videos left halfway or start from scratch, it’s adjustable. Viewing videos in landscape mode is a thing made easy, so there is no need to dig deep through settings and change. For portrait mode there is an option right under your nose. It supports subtitles which is handy if you’re watching foreign language movies. Hardware acceleration can be applied to more videos with the help of new H/W decoder. It also supports multi-core decoding.
All in all it’s a good app for sure.
VLC Player
From the makers of popular video viewing software on PC, comes VLC player the android app. Released more than year ago it’s still is beta version.
The video player cum audio player takes some time to follow the momentum of your handset. The player does choke on Full HD videos sometimes, but things should get better once they launch the ‘final’ version with performance improvements. It has a nice interface, though this could change as it nears its full launch, and it does offer browsing by folder through navigating down into the directory. But again viewing the entire video gallery must be available instead of folder view which can be kept as optional. An innovative feature this app contains is the sleep timer. Once you set a particular time, the player will automatically shut down at that time
Just a suggestion be patient for the app to be launched its final stage then see it drilling the videos.
BSPlayer
BSplayer comes in list because of it being a popular app in android market. But personally I would think of a second opinion.
This is good for general video viewing purposes, but if you are searching for specific functions look elsewhere. This app also fails to put all videos in single place as you have to navigate through each folder. Some function would be a help, to bring the videos together. But you can search for videos online and add the shortcuts to your folders. And another potentially handy feature is that BSPlayer can automatically search for subtitles on your behalf when you start a video, without any prompting. It also promises a neat sleep-timer feature just like VLC Player but, alas, we could not get this to work.
BSPlayer is a decent video-player, but not the best there is out there. It probably won’t appeal to those looking for an easy way to access all the videos stored on their handset.
So there we have it. Whether you are a hardcore movie addict of a casual onlooker, these video player apps are guaranteed to have you coming back for more. So get yourself a large screened Swipe Fablet and tablet, and kick back with a bucket of popcorn!