Exploring App Stores – Media Players for Android

One of the main reasons people buy Android phones is the wealth of customization options available in the form of apps. Apple’s App Store may still be the largest one today, but the Android Marketplace is expanding rapidly, and you’ll find most of the popular apps available on both platforms. When it comes to multimedia, the stock music and video player in Android offers very basic functionality and supports just a handful of formats. Unless you have something like Samsung’s TouchWiz UI, which supports MKV and FLAC out of the box, you have to rely on apps. Here are some of the best video and audio players available in the Marketplace, which I think are worth checking out.

RockPlayer Lite
We start off with RockPlayer Lite, a free video player that’s been around for sometime now and is still one of the best players. The player supports most popular video formats including MKV. The interface is not very fancy and directly gives you access to the folders and files in your phone. It also supports subtitles for movies.

A very capable barebones video player

Currently the only free version is available, which puts a little ‘R’ in the upper right corner of the screen and since the paid version has been taken down, there's no way around this.

Moboplayer
This is my personal favourite media player, as it offers all the features of RockPlayer in an easy-to-use interface. It supports multiple audio streams from a single video, multi-subtitles, hardware and software decoding, video streaming though HTTP protocols and thumbnail display of videos. The OSD controls are very intuitive as well, for example swiping your finger on the right side of the screen lets you control the volume, while the left controls the brightness.

Will play just about any video format

You can also lock the OSD by tapping the ‘Options’ soft key on your phone. The best part, besides it being free, is that when you start it the first time, it checks if you have the necessary codecs installed. If you don’t, it will redirect you to the Marketplace for the right codec pack for your phone.

TuneWiki 
Let’s face it, the stock Android music player is a disappointment. This is where TuneWiki comes in. It’s a novice friendly music player app with a social networking twist. You sign in using your Facebook or Twitter account and invite your friends on TuneWiki. Then, through the SongBox feature, you can see what your friends are listening to, which is a great way to discover new music.

Discover new music through your friends with Facebook and Twitter integration

It even has an ‘F Like’ option for Facebook. Song ID is a feature similar to Shazaam and Sound Hound. The app also automatically pulls lyrics for the currently playing song and shows up at the bottom of the ‘Now Playing’ screen. Other features include managing and editing playlists, Song Maps that let you discover what songs are trending, videos of the songs in your playlist and streaming radio from SHOUTcast.