Best Video Players for Android

Here is a non official list for the top video players for Android.

Act 1 Video Player is designed to play iPhone formats like 3gp, h263, and h264 baseline profile. It also claims to play some baseline MP4 files, but not all (it had no problem with mine). Other files will need converting, but thedeveloper page does point you in the direction of some free software that will do the job nicely. Act 1 is not only a tiny 500KB, but it can also be moved to your SD card.

Arc Media player can support a wide variety of video formats, including AVI, DIVX, MKV, MOV, MP4, RMVB, WMV, VOB and XVID. It’s still in beta, but is widely appreciated by testers so far.

Meridian is a huge 2.5MB, but can easily be moved to the SD card. It asks where your media is kept and quickly finds all of it. Gestures for navigating are intuitive and quick to use.

The mVideoPlayer app comes with rave reviews in the Android market. However, this app will only play whichever formats are already supported by your phone. Its 2.6MB install can be moved to the SD card, which is good news. The first search for video files will take a while, but it should load quicker in the future.

RealPlayer is an audio player as well as a video player. It has a handy interface to navigate between media types easily and can even display your photos. Sadly, it’s 3MB and can’t be moved to a SD card, so it’s only useful for users without space issues on their phone. It doesn’t say exactly which files it will play, but it couldn’t play my MP4′s. It played my home videos beautifully though.

RockPlayer is an ad-supported media player which at a massive 13MB fails to live up to the light impression. Thankfully, it can be moved to the SD card. Plays video smoothly and well.

VitalPlayer’s 5MB install can be automatically installed to your SD card. Sorry, VitalPlayer isn’t yet supported on Gingerbread.

VPlayer is my personal favourite simply because it’s so versatile and can be kept on the SD card, which is handy since it’s over 3MB. It plays all the major video formats, plus it can handle a variety of streaming video types. The free trial is fully featured, and the paid version is only a few dollars if you choose to upgrade.