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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.
MX Player launches its free movie and TV streaming service in the US, UK, and 5 more countries
It offers slightly older content with ads
Most of us know MX Player as the best video player on Android, able to handle any file format, codec, bitrate, or subtitle extension. What you may have missed though is that MX also has an on-demand movie and TV show streaming service in India. It's now expanding availability to seven countries, including the US and UK.
MX Player is one of the most widely used local video playback apps out there, and it just picked up a new feature that should make streaming from an in-home file server a bit easier. The latest v1.21.2 beta brings support for SMB, allowing you to access network media from servers or computers sharing files via the protocol.
Video players might be a dime a dozen on Android, but MX Player stood as one of the best in the early days, and it remains one of the most popular today. Even after Times Internet, a major Indian media company, acquired MX Player to give its own streaming services more visibility, it didn't prevent new features from being developed for local media. To that end, it's notable that you can now cast locally stored videos to Chromecast devices.
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 you're getting too giddy about the title of this post, I'll start by advising you to hold your horses. MX Player, one of the most popular video players on Android, has finally added Chromecast support, but it's not exactly where and how we wanted it to be. The feature is available inside the app, though only for online streaming content (which is currently limited to India).
MX Player, first released in 2011, has been one of the most popular Android video players for years. The app has now passed 500 million installations on the Play Store, marking another major milestone for the video player. MX Player doesn't appear to have been pre-installed on any Android devices, so that number should be 100% user downloads.
Most of us using Android are probably familiar with MX Player. It's one of the highest rated video playback apps on the Play Store, with a tremendous 100 million to 500 million downloads. According to a report published by The Ken, the app has just been acquired for $200 $145 million by the Times Internet, a large Indian media company.
With the Play Store's new ability to have apps go free momentarily, we rarely feel the need to highlight the weekly 10-cent deals anymore because they do seem less appealing than something going completely free, so we've been posting them in our long deal roundup posts instead. But we're making an exception here because the 10-cent discount is hitting one app you might have on your watchlist and that hasn't dropped in price a single time in 5 years: MX Player Pro. (Actually it even rose in price from $5.22 to $5.99 in December 2015.)
If you remember back in 2014, MX Player had to take a forced step of removing support for the AC-3 codec (also known as Dolby Digital) from its app. That killed a bit of MX Player's magic: it had previously been popular as the app that could play any and every video you threw at it, no need to worry about formats and encodings, and regardless of whether or not your device's own video player could support them. After the removal, users had to download custom-built codecs and manually point the app toward them as a make-do solution to gain back AC-3 capabilities.
There are numerous video players available on the Play Store, each with its own strengths. MX Player, one of the more popular ones, has just received an update that adds a few great features, such as multi-window support for devices running Android 7.0 Nougat, a new decoder, and screen-off playback.
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So you've got a bunch of video files on your phone or tablet (all legally acquired I'm sure), but they use a variety of codecs. One of the more popular ways to play them is MX Player, which has a few hundred million downloads in the Play Store—no big deal. Now you can get the latest tweaks and features in MX Player via a Play Store beta.
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.
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.
MX Player is now ready for Android Lollipop. No, it's not any prettier than it was before. There's no Material Design to drool over, no bright colors, nor a floating action button to make us feel like we're living at the end of 2014. This video player is largely the same app as before. Its developer has just removed the restriction that prevented it from running on 5.0 devices. Now people who rely on MX Player don't have to do without when upgrading to Lollipop.
MX Player, one of the most popular video players on the Play Store (and my personal player of choice as of recent), hasn't worked since Android 4.4.1's release. Those who immediately upgraded to 4.4.1 lost access to MX Player and were instead greeted with the following popup:
MX has always been a pretty impressive video player - it's chocked full of useful features and offers nearly every codec imaginable. Today, it received an update to v1.7 that brings a fair amount of performance improvements for various devices, as well as one really neat key feature: background playback.