You can enable the VLC video player inside my app’s General > Video settings. The VLC player is likely the most compatible video player around and can be used for playing many older formats that may not otherwise play on Android.
Benefits
If you have videos that are not playing correctly in my apps and those videos are not mp4 or mov files, enabling VLC may be your best option for getting them to play. You can enable VLC by going into the app settings > General > VLC and enabling it. You can then select which file types should be played with VLC.
It is important to test each file type that you enable by manually playing the file. Ensure that it does play better in VLC, since enabling VLC is not without its downsides.
Tradeoffs
There are negatives to enabling VLC. The following tradeoffs may be acceptable if it means playing videos that would not otherwise play.
- VLC is a separate app with its own issues. I cannot provide support for VLC.
- VLC will display a spinning progress when loading videos over the network. This cannot be removed.
- VLC may take some time to start and this can make the slideshow more choppy.
MP4 / MOV and hardware acceleration
VLC is a good choice for older formats, but if your videos are not playing because they use encodings that are too new, it is unlikely to help.
If your videos are 4K on a 1080p device or they are HEVC and using a newer codec that your device, VLC may have to fallback to software decoding and that can be too slow for playback.
Likewise, newer iPhone or Samsung videos in portrait mode may play squished or in landscape mode because the hardware doesn’t support their rotation. You may be able to make VLC do the rotation in software by going into the VLC settings > Hardware Acceleration and changing it to Disabled or Decoding Acceleration. But for most videos encoded with HEVC, this will result in the videos playing too slow.
Again, it is important to manually test your videos after enabling VLC to ensure they are better. If the in app player does not work and VLC does not work, it is very likely the video is either too old or too new to be played on the hardware. In that case, re-encoding the video using handbrake would be required or using a photo service (Google Photos, Flickr, or OneDrive Personal) that does allows apps like my own to play a transcoded version of the video that is compatible with all devices.