Best Free Media Player for Android

These are the products I reviewed in this article:

• MX Video Player
• MoboPlayer
• RealPlayer

MX Video Player can only play videos, but it does that very well.

One of this app's stand out features is its support for almost any file format. While I have seen some apps that will support certain video file formats, they will often be pixelated or aliased. This app, on the other side, plays them as if they were natively supported. I tried playing some flv files on this video player (on a device where flv files are not natively supported), and the video looked as good as ever.

When you open the app, you will find a list of folders on your device that contain videos. An interesting feature here is the "new" feature - the app will recognize recently added videos, and add a red "new" label to them. Folders with new videos will also get a "new" label. This often makes it easier to find what you need.

The features of this app don't end here, though. The interface you get while playing videos is great. Slide your finger up or down on the right half of the screen to adjust volume. Slide your finger up or down on the left half of the screen to adjust brightness. If you want, you can also use automatic brightness, but it took me a while to find that buried in the settings. Slide your finger left or right to seek. Use two fingers to zoom the video. You won't be able to pan around, though.

Then, you can tap on the video for play/pause, next video, previous video, lock controls, position controls, and a seek bar. The lock control could be handy for some - it prevents your device's home, back, and menu buttons from having any effect. The position controls are especially nice. It can stretch the video, crop it, resize it to fit the screen, or play it at 100% size. On the top right you can also change the codec you're using. This is handy when video doesn't play correctly using hardware decoding. Hardware decoding, for those of you who don't know, is the way Android devices normally play video, as opposed to software decoding. Hardware decoding is generally more efficient than software decoding, however, hardware decoding is not always available.

The only irritation during video playback is that when the controls come up, the video resizes for some reason. When the controls disappear, the video goes back to the way it was before. This is slightly irritating, but should definitely not be a reason not to use this app.

Overall, this app is an excellent video player (it won't do photos or music), but it does videos amazingly well, and is definitely worth a download.

After this we have MoboPlayer. This app is similar to MX Video Player in many ways, starting with that it only plays videos.

Again, this media player supports a wide variety of file formats, although here, it's not as simple and straightforward as with MX Video Player. I tried to play the same flv file I used for MX Video player. Instead of playing the video normally, it came up with some odd icon with a shamrock, and then went to play the video, saying that hardware decoding could not be used, and that software decoding would need to be used. Advanced users will know what that is supposed to mean, but for those of us who don't understand, it would just be a lot simpler for it to play, and do nothing more. MX Video Player's approach is much simpler. This is a fairly minor complaint, but you see this trend throughout Mobo Video Player - everything seems to be more complicated than it needs to be. Other than that, though, the video plays fine.

Finding your videos is odd - it displays a list of folders that you chose perfectly normally. But, when you go into one of those folders, it shows all of the videos, without actually showing you which video is in which subfolder. It makes for a confusing mess if you've got a lot of videos organized in folders - Mobo won't recognize that they're in subfolders. When it comes to the way the videos are presented, you can either have them in a list or in a grid, but the grid seems to be pretty laggy. If you're on a dual core processor, you might be OK, but otherwise forget it. You can also get an interface similar to Cover flow on Apple devices, but then, this is a pain to use, because it interprets my clicks as flicks. Too bad, really, because otherwise, the interface actually looks nicer than Apple's, in my opinion, and is very smooth.

The buttons let you switch views, choose the folders that have videos, choose how to sort the videos (here my complaint about the subfolders is partially answered - you can sort them by directory), and you can refresh something. What that something is remains a mistery to me. It has something to do with thumbnails, but which ones, I have no idea. You can also resume play from whatever video you last watched, without needing to know which one it was. That is pretty handy, except for in the cover flow-like interface, where it looks like it is a play button for the video in the middle, leaving me surprised to find a video of a subway when I thought I chose a video about a cloud service.

The interface while playing the video is almost identical to MX video player when it comes to how it works. Slide your finger up or down on the right half of the screen to control the volume, and on the left half of the screen for brightness. Slide your finger to the left or to the right to seek. But, again, the controls don't work the way they are supposed to. For example, the volume control has some sort of momentum system or something similar. Whatever it is, it sometimes leaves you dragging your finger down while the volume is going up, or moving your finger slowly and the volume moving up quickly, or the other way around. Same thing with the brightness. When it comes to the seek function, again, it is complicated. When you seek, you will see a box that shows you where you are going to, in time, and in percentage. Then, it won't move there until you confirm that you want to move there by tapping on that box. While advanced users might appreciate this, it's just too complicated for the average user.

The controls you get when you tap on the screen are also similar to those found in MX video player. Play/Pause, previous video, next video, and seek, which thankfully work as expected. When it comes to how the video is cropped or stretched, it is quite confusing to figure out what means what. It also seems to be missing a standard crop to full screen. In the advanced menu, you can find some information on the video, such as resolution, size and decoder, but you can't change the decoder you're using. So, if a video won't play using hardware decoding and Mobo doesn't recognize it, you're stuck.

Some people might have a special feature that they're looking for in this app, but otherwise this app isn't all that great. It is way too confusing, and doesn't really offer much that other players don't. If Mobo seems down your alley, I would definitely recommend a download for MX first.

RealPlayer has always been a good media player for desktop computers. Now, it has been developed for Android.

The experience starts with a very nicely designed home screen, which slightly reminds me of Windows Media Center.  RealPlayer finds your music, videos and photos very well, but it might take a little time at first. It will find your media without any progress indicator, so you might be wondering what is going on. However, once it finds your stuff, it runs very well.

The app has three parts - music, videos and photos. Here, we will be going over the videos and photos. For the music part, head over to Best Free Music Player and Organizer for Android.

You can explore videos by folders, with a small thumbnail for each video. This makes it easy to find what you want. I quickly found the video of my teacher dancing to ACDC I took during an after party... (he actually has quite the moves)

The main problem is the format support - this player will basically only support what your device already supports.

The photos section is the one area this app is lagging behind. It only shows the pictures you took with your phone's camera. You can do the typical thing - look at them individually, or play a slideshow.

As a side note, I would like to say that people who love using gestures will be very disappointed by this app, as it is almost only controlled with buttons - you don't even get multi-touch zooming on pictures.

Aside from the complaints I mentioned, I have to say that generally, this is a fair media player. It definitely has potential, and has points where it could be improved. Once these problems are fixed, this will be a decent media player in terms of the interface. If you want more codecs, on the other hand, this app won't help you.

More apps to be reviewed:

• QQPlayer
• mVideoPlayer
• Meridian Media Player Revolute
• RockPlayer Lite
• VitalPlayer

You might want to check out these articles too:

• Best Free Media Player
• Best Free Android Apps
• Best Free iPad Apps
• Best Free iPhone Apps

This software category is maintained by volunteer editor trainman261. Registered members can contact the editor with any comments or questions they might have by clicking here.

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