There are many video players for Android out there, but there are few that have proven themselves to be mighty in the way MX Player has. It is not only one of the longest-standing popular video players out there, but it’s also stayed high and above in the game with sensible features, amazing performance (not as easy back in those days!) and an amazing user experience. What makes MX Player amazing, and why is it worthy of your media?
First of all, MX Player supports a myriad of formats and codecs off the bat. It doesn’t matter where you got the movie from, chances are it will play. You can also stream media through a network stream by providing a valid URL. Audio should also not be a problem, and MX Player can recognize every popular subtitle format and render them with their appropriate colors and characteristics. These are also easy to configure with subtitle gestures, being able to move text up and down or zoom in and out to change the text size. As far as the core support goes, you can easily fire and forget as you are not likely to find any compatibility issues.
When it comes to the user experience, MX Player is mostly minimal yet feature-packed. The interface is one of the most unobtrusive ones you will find, with pleasant navigation that’s intuitive and fast. It’s clean all around, and common features are easy to spot. You can lock rotation to avoid any annoyances without having to go to a panel toggle or setting. You can also lock the screen to prevent input, so that accidental touches don’t ruin your movie’s climax. Finally, gestures for brightness, sound, zooming and seeking are easy to use and make it easy for you to find just the right settings you want for the appropriate context. You can also customize the seek speed, auto-hide timer, and which gestures are enabled.
Apart from being able to set the audio and subtitle tracks in a pinch, you can set your preferred languages as well. If you want to use the player for music or to simply listen to a movie, you can set it to play audio in the background even after the screen is closed. As for the playback UI, you can have it clean or set various overlays that are not too distracting and can help you keep track of elapsed and remaining time as well as current time and battery left.
Finally, while many people rather use the player as-is for typical media consumption, you have hardware acceleration as well as the solid software decoding. The former makes use of multimedia chipsets that assist specifically in the video decoding process, and it can make playback faster and smoother. While it is not as flexible as software decoding, it can optimize the experience by making better use of your system. As technology moves on, this feature can admittedly be overlooked – you certainly won’t need it to play your average 1080p film on a recent flagship, but it remains a great option to have regardless. HW+ builds on top of that, though, by using MX Player’s own media framework which allows the mode to play more videos. You can find the option in the decoder settings if your device supports it.
There are many other things that make MX Player great, but ultimately it is its flexibility that allowed it to stand the test of time. You can grab this swiss knife of video consumption and make it your own, be it through theming the interface’s colors to your liking, adjusting parts of the UI, arranging your folders, or modifying your gestures, subtitles, or whatever you want. There are many little things to love as well, such as the fact that the player reminds you of recent files you haven’t yet seen, or the Kids Lock plugin. The fact that all features are included in the free version is the cherry on top, and the Pro version is a small price to pay to make the experience perfect while supporting a huge community app. So what are you waiting for? If you don’t have it, give it a try!
You can get MX Player in the Play Store, and be sure to visit its Community App subforum for everything you need including custom codecs, guides, and more!
Do you love MX Player as much as we do?
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