Best media player apps for Android to play Video and Music

Moving out of the monotonous world of Nokia, iPhone became a sleeper hit en masses. AT almost the same time a very powerful Mobile Operating System was developed by the search giant i.e. Google. While it was earlier dubbed as droid and supposed to contain great technical and performance characteristics, it was eventually dubbed as Android Operating System. A Mobile Phone Operating System so sophisticated and productive that it was termed as a Phone only for geeks, but now times have changed. Even though at first, the Android operating system was developed and used by tech-savvy people and software developers, it eventually reached the point where anyone can use it, being just as easy to use as the iPhone or a Windows Mobile device. Today Android has to its credit the best media player apps as video players and music players, making the Android the coolest device with the coolest range of apps. That is exactly why the OHA (Open Handset Alliance – the consortium of companies that currently own and promote the OS) is creating a lot of new consumer-oriented smartphones and MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices) running on Android.

The last year has seen a significantly higher amount of mainstream and entertainment apps being launched on the Android Marketplace. This year, even more are coming. Games, organizers, emulators, ftp clients, web browsers – a lot of very useful and advanced apps are currently available for anyone to use on an Android device. The last year has seen a significantly higher amount of mainstream and entertainment apps being launched on the Android Marketplace. This year, even more are coming. Games, organizers, emulators, ftp clients, web browsers – a lot of very useful and advanced apps are currently available for anyone to use on an Android device.
MixZing.

This app is said to be the most advanced music player available for the Android OS, and judging by user reviews, it really is so. It has a lot of nice features like automatically finding and downloading artist info, photos, videos and missing album art and a nice feature called “Mood Player”, which works sort of like the iTunes Genius, playing music similar to the one you listen the most (and therefore, like the most). And you can’t beat the price – it is totally free!
Act 1 Video Player.

This app is the best video player for Android, according to all the user reviews you can find online. It can play most video file formats; it’s stable and not too demanding on the hardware. The controls are simple and it even supports Bluetooth media keys, but unfortunately, still lacks playlist support, although when you play 20-30 minutes long video files, it’s not that hard to just open another one manually. There is a free trial version, but the full version will cost you $1.50, which is not much considering you’ll get free updates for life and it’s pretty much the only video player you’ll ever need.
Meridian Player

This is a great video and music player, and it’s pretty much the best (and only) all-in-one media player available on the marketplace. It will play most video and audio files, has a clean interface and a few nice advanced features like searching for lyrics to songs and subtitles to movies, editing ID3 tags, rating files and controlling the app via gestures. Meridian player supports resume for video, also if a film is split up into several files it will seamlessly autoplay the files in sequence. The price is acceptable, in fact its too good! – it is completely free!
Video Player

This aptly named application is, well, a video player. It works quite well, it’s stable, but it only supports Mpeg-4 and 3GPP encoded files, so it is a bit limiting. But if you convert all your videos on your desktop PC, you should be fine. It has one unique feature that other players lack other than Meridian Player, and that is resuming playback – it works for all the files you play. The controls are simple, the performance is good, and it is free – enough for 95% of all users.
Cinema

This is a very simple video player with a very simple name. It’s completely free; it’s very stable and has the highest performance around due to the use of the hardware decoder available on most new Android phones (like the Nexus One and the Droid). The controls are unique, too – it has no buttons, you control it using gestures (tap your finger on the screen to play/pause, double-tap to fullscreen, swipe left/right for quick rewind/forward, etc.). The only drawback is that it supports only h.264 encoded files in mp4 and 3gp formats, but the performance of the playback more than makes up for this.
As the Android System evolves, the hardware specs of mobiles too would evolve and so would the functionality and compatibility of these media players to playbacks files of a bigger range of media types. Much of the action regarding these Media Players i.e. Music Players and Video Players can be checked out at the Android MarketPlace which is also known as Android AppStore. One thing that can be noted is that there are too many free media player apps out there which have great features and are highly commendable. What remains now is how the future media player applications shape up. A lot of potential is available in the video player Application segment.