VLC for Android

Description

VLC for Android This is a continuation of my Android tidbits. During my lengthy (in both directions) iPhone-to-Android transition I played my fair share of videos on Android phones. I was especially impressed with how well they handled MPEG-2 streams, VEGAC, MPEG-4 and MPEG-4 AVC/H.264. It’s obvious that AVC and H.264 are not so much used anymore but MPEG-4 remains widely used. This is a great evolution as we see how a generation passes and we see even Android phones have hardware support for this new format. There’s an upgrade path from DV to AVC/H.264 but unfortunately most phones support only one codec or a bit of both. As time goes on and more devices support AVC/H.264 we will see that you will not have to turn anything on and manually switch back to DV. All devices from Samsung to HTC can make this upgrade in software so the big difference between phones like the Galaxy S II and Nexus S (and many others) is how much pressure they put on the manufacturer to support both codecs in the device. During my second trip to China I was excited to find a simple AVC/H.264-encoding app for my LG G2. The app appeared to be an app for Android in general but it actually only supported VLC so I could run my iPhone files in full HD quality without any extra effort. I had initially considered getting the MediaToolkit application that seemed to support all Android phones (except the iPhone) but that application requires Windows (for instance) which I didn’t have. VLC was free for the Android platform and it worked perfectly. I’m talking high-quality streaming across a 2GB LTE connection. So now you should know how to make this upgrade but it’s one of those things that’s easy to forget if you have a fresh Android phone for the first time. You will probably want to give the app another go if you’re not happy with the quality or you like to manually tweak video quality or audio playback. The VLC Android app There’s another app that can help you make this conversion and it’s the very popular media player VLC. This app is generally used to stream media to computers but VLC also has a mode that can convert your files. Since I mentioned AVC/H.264 I thought it would be great to see if this app would play those files in Android. VLC for Android provides support for VLC for Windows and VLC for Mac but also allows you to run your Windows videos in Android 4.0 or higher so you’re ready to go. There’s a default player that allows you to manually switch between the two devices so you can easily go back and forth. VLC has a free version that supports playback of all video formats you could ever need so you don’t have to worry about data storage and you don’t need to have a very large data plan for it either. The free version is great because the features of the premium version cannot be accessed without paying for a subscription. For $9.99 a year you will gain access to playback of VLC media files in Android. The iOS version of VLC also has a freemium version that lets you skip audio tracks but it has limited support for playback of videos. VLC Media Player for Android The audio and video playback doesn’t need to be perfect. Just play them and see how they perform. If the playback quality is not good enough the playback of the videos might be too. There are several different video codecs that can be supported by VLC. If you start with a lot of files that are both high quality and of the same size you can then just choose the video codec that gives you the best possible playback on Android. For videos of any size the Android version of VLC is great as it has one of the fastest input/output speeds I’ve seen for a multimedia player. It’s fast, it’s easy to use and it works perfectly. If you don’t like the audio bitrate or playback speed of VLC it doesn’t matter because your iPhone files will be fine for everything else. There’s a warning for some files though. The app can only play files of at least 720p which is fine for smartphone users but Android tablets and TVs will have a higher resolution. If you’re ready to enjoy your video content on Android then go ahead and grab the Android version of VLC Media Player. Your device will probably be a little slow at the beginning but it will be fine for all of your files. Please enable JavaScript to watch this video. If you’re ready to get your videos and audio files on Android then you should also know that the Android system allows you to download and install apps for free. It’s easy and sometimes the apps you want are the very same apps that are available for the iOS platform. That’s great because you don’t have to have two different systems in place. All of the apps you see in the Android Market are free to download and there’s no added fee for the Android system (via the Windows Phone Marketplace) if you want to access the Android application to play media.

By Mohabbat Khan