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14 best video players on Android in 2024
View content in various video codecs with these handy Android video players
While plenty of fantastic streaming services exist, everyone knows the pain of your favorite movie suddenly becoming unavailable. Owning your media solves this problem, but you'll need to choose a platform to play your videos. While you can play videos through your phone's inbuilt media player, third-party apps offer significantly greater functionality.
Chromebooks are about to get a prettier video player
Complete with scrubbing, skip forward/backward, and more
Chromebooks have an incredibly barebones video player interface that hasn't changed much over the years. It looks like Google finally wants to change that. The company is testing a much prettier video player in Canary, complete with enhanced, floating controls.
Files by Google gets gestures for volume and brightness control (Update: Double-tap to seek)
No pinch to zoom, though
Read update
One of the things that first struck me about MX Player, when I tried it out many years ago, was its swiping gestures on each side of the screen. Instead of looking for physical volume buttons or pausing the video to find the brightness controls on my phone, a simple swipe would adjust those without skipping a second. These same gestures are now available in Android's built-in video player.
MX Player gains in-app YouTube playback and more in latest beta build
One of the most popular video playing apps gets an upgrade
MX Player is one of the most popular apps for playing back media content on Android devices thanks to features like picture-in-picture playback and Chromecasting local files. In the latest beta release, the app is implementing several new additions including pinch-to-zoom and in-app YouTube browsing.
VLC is one of the best media players. It's available on pretty much any platform and able to play almost every audio and video file type you could think of. Its UI on Android has become a bit stale over the years though, so with the recently released version 3.2.3 of the app, the developers have decided to polish up the looks while also adding new features to the Android TV and Chromebook variants.
As one of the most popular and fully-featured video player apps available on the Play Store, we've become accustomed to MX Player getting useful new features on a regular basis. Most recently, the team behind it added Chromecast support for online streaming content, and the latest update includes a Picture-in-Picture function.
If it were up to us, every video would be 16:9, with some exceptions made for some more cinematic footage. But because there are older videos and people unaware of vertical video syndrome on YouTube, videos with inferior aspect ratios are an unfortunate reality. The team behind YouTube is making the best of this situation and has now forced its web player to adapt to different aspect ratios.
Chrome 65 came out last week, and included Google's new ad-blocker and a few other security features. Chrome 66 has now graduated to the beta channel, and has several major experimental features. There's a new 'Modern Design' interface, partially based on the ill-fated Chrome Home UI, as well as updates to the media player and a new Clipboard API.
The video player on Chrome for Android has always closely mirrored (or looked identical to) the desktop Chrome video player. There's a play/pause button, a timeline, and whatever other controls the site has enabled (full-screen, volume, download, etc.). A brand new video player has appeared in Chrome Dev and Canary, with the same double-tap to fast-forward/rewind that the YouTube app added earlier this year.
Plex has been up to lot lately; it wasn't too long ago that the company announced Live TV, a free service for all Pass subscribers. Shifting back to a stronger Android focus, the app is getting a rather interesting update starting today. V6.0 (technically, 6.0.1.523) adds the ability to play locally-stored video files on your phone or tablet.
VLC, the desktop favorite of local video enthusiasts for more than a decade, doesn’t have quite the same kind of universal acclaim on Android. But the developers are still hard at work making improvements. According to a blog post from Geoffrey Metais, the 2.1.0 update to the beta release adds a ton of new features, notably including compatibility with Android Auto (for audio, not video).
Appfour likes a challenge when it comes to making apps for Android Wear. Try to think of an app that you can imagine very little use for on a tiny watch screen, and Appfour has probably already made it: browser, Gmail client, YouTube Player, messaging, PDF and Drive viewer, Calendar, and more have been developed by the team who continues to cater to the demands of a very niche section of Wear users.
Video on your watch. Video... on your watch. Yup, it's a thing now. And not just any video, millions and millions of videos (at least 20% of which feature cats) on the world's biggest distribution service. Pack it in, NASA. Hit the showers, CERN. Go suck eggs, DARPA. There's no need to try anymore: now that we've got a YouTube app for Android Wear, humanity has reached its absolute peak.
Android's default video capabilities leave a lot to be desired, so the Play Store has a small but thriving industry of third-party video players. MX Player has been one of the most dependable among them, and the latest update fixes a few bugs on Android 5.0+ devices and adds a few new features. The most notable is probably the new ability to upload and download subtitle files from the web. That's a big deal if you often watch videos in a language you can't speak - anime fans, ahem, accessing unavailable shows come to mind.
Following VLC on Android over the last couple of months has felt a little bit like a shell game. It all started in December when VideoLAN declared VLC was finally leaving behind its Beta status. The app retained the same package name, org.videolan.vlc.betav7neon, but was to be considered stable. Earlier this month, a brand new version 1.0 VLC app appeared in the Play Store with a package name and title devoid of the word 'beta.' This new app was to become the channel for stable releases, while the original listing was again repurposed for beta releases. This only lasted a few days before the new version vanished from the Play Store on devices and ceased to be installable from the web, at least for many of us.
Among tech-savvy media fans, Video LAN Client (VLC for short) is easily one of the most popular video and audio players in the world. It's available for every major desktop platform, and for almost two years, it's been in beta for Android. Today the app has officially graduated to a 1.0 build, marking its formal exit from beta and a day of celebration for fans of flexible media playback on mobile devices. In other words: Good news, everyone!
Since the recent update to MX Player, many users are running into a new problem: there's no sound in certain videos. It turns out the latest release of the popular video player removed support for two audio codecs: AC3 and MLP. Unfortunately, it seems this is a result of licensing issues, meaning MX Player will no longer ship with built-in support to play these audio formats. However, there is a simple workaround that will get things working again with relatively little hassle.