Android High Five
If someone had told young me that I'd be watching films on an internet ready device that I keep in my pocket, I would have laughed and then asked when, cos it sounds really cool. Now it's a reality and making sure you've got the right player for you is vital. Here are a few of the best.
Nice and easy to use, allowing you to get on with the task at hand: enjoying your media. With swipe controls for subtitles, brightness, volume and search, you can adjust the important things without bringing up a single menu and interrupting your viewing. There's also a kids lock available with a plugin, so you can leave them watching safe in the knowledge that they can't make any calls or use any other apps.
It will only play files that your device already supports which can limit you if you have a lot of different formats, but visually it's very pleasing. Subtitle support is strong, your content is easy to find, menus are a joy to navigate and if you find a file that the app won't play, it will let you open it in another app that will. Not as advanced as some but a solid basic player.
The selling point here (not that the app costs anything) is that you are able to have multiple windows, of varying sizes, open at once. It may not be a feature that everyone wants and it does require a certain power from your device ,but even without it this is one of the best players out there. Your playback position can be saved for later and the interface is crisp, clean and easy to navigate
You get no BS with BSPlayer. Video playback is hardware accelerated which means it runs faster while reducing battery consumption, it supports a huge number of formats (flv, divx, avi, mp4, wmv etc) and allows playback from compressed RAR files. You can also stream from your media collection over wi-fi without the need to convert. A pleasing experience all round.
It's a beta, but it seems to work as well as its competitors. VLC should be familiar to most PC users, offering as it does pretty much flawless playback for a wide variety of video formats including AVI and MP4. It doesn't work with Chromecast and full HD isn't supported as yet, but what it does it des well. It also has an widget for audio so can be used for your music as well as video.
