Our Review:

Ah, VLC. That rock solid media player that can always be relied upon... at least on the desktop. On mobile, sadly enough, it's a different story. It's improved since the last time I tried it (back then it was in beta) and it sucked the battery out of my previous phone faster than I thought was possible, somehow leaving no trace in the battery usage information. However, it still isn't quite what is is on other platforms.

The first problem becomes apparent when you start it for the first time - it needs to scan your phone for videos. Fine, I thought, it's not the only media player that needs to do that, so I switched to a different app and did something else while I was waiting. A couple of minutes later, I checked back to see what it was doing, and it was still working. I kept on checking back, but even a good while later, it still wasn't done. I had to uninstall it because it was hogging my storage, but when I reinstalled it, I decided to let it do its thing. And no, I'm not joking or exaggerating when I say that it took over a half hour - if I remember correctly, even close to an hour - to scan my phone. Yes, I have a lot on my phone, but no other media player takes anywhere near as long as this to scan it.

The other problem comes to light once it's done scanning your library: the video list. Snappy as you would expect it to be at first, but scroll just a little too far and it gets so laggy it will entirely freeze for a couple of seconds doing I-don't-know-what. It also doesn't help that it's hard to tell what is a video and what is a folder, leading me to initially wonder where a large part of my videos had gone.

At least these problems aren't present in the music lists. In fact, VLC, serves as a decent music player - don't expect anything I talk about in the reviews of full-on music players like tag editing or automatic playlist generation - we're only talking about basic functionality. However, what it does, it does pretty well - it even has an equalizer which sounds pretty darned good, even though it does take a while to react to your changes.

The video playing interface is also decently well done, with a good amount of functionality, including speed, subtitle and audio track and delay, snooze and crop controls. You can also choose an external subtitle file for the video. Like MX, VLC lets you seek and control the volume via gesture controls. You can also play the video in a floating player, which actually works pretty well.

For those looking to browse their media files by directory, VLC also supports that - it even supports browsing and playing files on your network, although I had trouble getting it to work initially - soon after that, VLC froze... I tried it again and it worked fairly seamlessly, over SMB as well as over UPnP. It also supports playing streams, although I wasn't able to test it due to a lack of sources.

There is a decent amount of options including some fairly advanced options, so you should be able to find what you're looking for. For instance, you can set it to use a TV-friendly interface (for those looking to use this on an Android TV), remember playback speed or brightness for videos, and use hardware acceleration or not.

Finally, one aggravating flaw is the amount of space it takes up on my device... a whopping 159MB. Again - yes, I realize I have a lot on my phone, but no other media player needs this much space, meaning that there's not really enough room on my phone for it.

You may have something specific you're looking for in VLC, but if not, I would recommend our top choice, MX player. While VLC presents some interesting options, it (still) has too many problems for me to consider it as a top choice, even though it has potential.