Editor’s note: You can find more video and music apps for Google Android at our Android Multimedia page. And if you’re looking for another media player for Android that can handle Xvid, DiVX, MKV, WMV, and many other formats, check out our article on RockPlayerBase.

Google Android’s gallery application can handle image and video playback in a handful of formats. But if you want to play videos that aren’t encoded in MP4 or H.264 formats, you’re going to need to grab a third party video player. Unfortunately, at the moment third party video players for Android are few and far between. But xda-developers forum member Zeno Chan discovered a Chinese app called Wuzhenhua Player that looks quite promising.

The Wuzhenhua Player is rough around the edges. It doesn’t handle playback in landscape mode very well. And the program dialogs are all in Chinese. But it makes up for all of that with its support for a wide range of audio and video formats including:

4xm, 8bps, aac, ac3, eac3, amv, ape, dca, imc, alas, rm, rmvb, nuv, ptx, tta, wma, wmv, flic, flac, flv, g726, h261, h263, h264, mp1, mp2, mp3, mp4, smc, tmv, dvdsub, dvbsub

I had better results with some video formats than other. I tested a WMV file which played smoothly, as did one DivX video I tested. But while the video player opened a Xvid video, playback was slow and choppy. This may have more to do with the bit rate and resolution than the codec itself.

If you don’t happen to speak Chinese, but want to give the app a try anyway, here’s a cheat sheet. The picture on the left shows the screen you get when you launch Wuzhenhua Player. The left button says “open” and that’s the one you click to open a browser where you can navigate to the folder where your videos are kept. The second button from the left says “play,” followed by “pause,” and “stop.”

On the open files dialog, there’s a button on the right side of the screen, which says “OK.” Click this one after you’ve selected your video. It’ll take you back to the first screen, where you can hit play. At the top of the video screen there are two buttons. The left one says “pause,” and the second says “close.”

You can find a download link and more pictures at the xda-developers forum.

Update: There’s now an English language version. Or rather, a partially translated version that should be a little easier for English speakers to use. You can download it here. via xda-developers

Update 2: Version 4.1 adds a full screen mode and the ability to control the screen refresh rate.