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The best Android video player available!

Video on Android FAQ

To help you set your expectations for the video capabilities of your Android device, I'll try to answer the top questions I get on a regular basis:

Can't you make it play AVI, MOV, MKV, WMV, or whatever my favorite video format is?

Short answer: Android devices currently only have built-in support various types of video files. Consult your phone's technical specifications to find out what it supports. You must encode your videos to a format it supports in order to get it to play. All Android phones should play h264/mp4 baseline profile and 3gp videos, which is the same as what the iPod and iPhone support. See the my encoding howto for some tips on converting videos.

Some newer phones, such as the Droid, can play WMV just fine whereas some older phones, like my G1 cannot. I've heard that some phones can play AVI. I'm sure even newer phones coming out will have better support for more video types in the future, and Act 1 will be able to play them because it just taps into the codecs that are built into your phone.

Today, the only video formats you will be able to play on an Android phone are the ones that the manufacturer of the phone has built into it. If you want your phone to play all you various video file formats, you'll probably just have to wait for a phone to be released that has the support for them.

This means that for the G1, the only video formats you can play are 3GPP and MP4 with futher restrictions on the encoding of the video and audio data. It just so happens that these are the same restrictions imposed by the iPod. For a technical breakdown of what your G1 can actually play, go to http://developer.android.com/guide/appendix/media-formats.html. Fortunately, there is desktop software that will help you convert your existing videos to something that will play on the G1. I talk about that later in this page.

Why does my video appear choppy or slow?

One thing to realize about mobile devices is that are very limited in computing power. They are not at all as powerful as your typical desktop computer. Because they are so limited, your videos should be limited for both the screen size (the G1 is 480x320) and for computing resources. The software you use to create your video should help you with that. As a general rule, you probably want to keep your video's bitrate (the amount of data required to process over a period of time) under 700kb/s. Going lower makes your videos smaller and reduces the chance that something will stutter during playback and help the battery last longer.

The easiest and least expensive thing you can do to make a video that plays on Android is to use a desktop application called Handbrake (availble for Windows, Mac, and Linux). It has a conversion profile for the iPod which worked fine for me.

Another thing you can try with Act 1 is hiding the on-screen display elements using the menu options. They do incur some overhead during playback.

Another thing to consider is that Android is a full multi-tasking operating system, which means that there could be lots of programs running at the same time as your video player, and that creates contention for the resources needed to play a video. A poorly-behaved application could be chewing up your resources and making it hard to play back video.

How do I encode videos to take advantage of Verizon Droid's big screen?

Again, the affordable answer is Handbrake, but with some customizations for the screen size. Check out this thread on Android Forums. And not just because that poster recommended Act 1. :-)

This site was designed to be easily read on devices with small displays and limited bandwidth.

If you have any questions or helpful hints about encoding and playing videos on Android platforms, please let me know. You can email me at: android at hyperaware dot com