MoboPlayer is a new video player for Google Android, and it may just be the most impressive multimedia app I’ve seen for the platform. The app supports most video formats including MP4, MOV, and MKV, and also supports subtitles and multiple audio streams. You can create playlists for continues playback, and the app can also stream internet media using http and rtsp protocols.

I tested playback with a standard definition DiVX file, and the video looked great. The player is also very responsive when pausing or skipping forward or back in a video.

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There’ a new version of the doubleTwist media player app for Google Android, and in addition to support for playing music and podcasts on your device, doubleTwist 1.1 now lets you play online radio streams.

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You can access a director of radio stations by clicking the Radio tab on the home screen. From there you can browse through a lengthy list of categories and subcategories. For instance, under Folk, there are alternative folk, contemporary folk, traditional folk, folk rock, and world folk categories.

There are also “top rated” and “recently played” tabs atop the Radio tab, giving you quick access to your favorite stations.

My one complaint with the new online radio feature is that there’s currently no way to search for a station. So if you already have a few favorite stations that you want to listen to, you’ll have to guess at which category they should be listed under and hope that you’ll find them. I have three presets in TuneIn Radio for my two favorite local radio stations and one internet-only one, and I couldn’t easily find any of them in the doubleTwist directory.

DoubleTwist 1.1 also adds support for playlist management and an “add to play queue” option. While doubleTwist is a pretty full featured media player for Android, it really comes into its own when you install the doubleTwist desktop app for PC or Mac, which lets you synchronize songs and playlists between a computer and Android device. It’s sort of like iTunes for Android — and even supports syncing your iTunes library.

DoubleTwist is available as a free download from the Android Market. You can read about the latest changes to the Android app in the release notes.

via Android Central

Like many phone makers, Acer has developed a custom home screen app for its Android smartphone. The Acer Liquid Stream comes with a Home Launcher that looks really slick. It shows the time and date in the top area, and two rows of apps near the bottom, for quick access to your phone, contact, calendar, web browser, and other frequently used apps.

Hit the menu button or drag up from the bottom and you get a complete list of available apps, which you can drag down when you’re done.

One of the things that really makes this Home Launcher stand out is that instead of dragging left and right to see different screens with widgets and shortcuts, when you swipe from left to right you see a history screen showing recently launched apps. Swipe the other way and you get a media screen with links to photos, music, and movies stored on your device.

Want to give it a try, but don’t have an Acer Liquid Stream? Not to worry. A member of the xda-developers forum has grabbed the installer file for the Acer Home Launcher app and posted it online.

The basic app runs fine on my Google Nexus One, although it hides the notification bar at the top of the screen. But, like several other users, I get a force close error when I press and hold the home screen to adjust the desktop wallpaper.

He’s also posted a pretty slick media player called NemoPlayer which works with the media tab on the home screen. But it’s also pretty nice as a standalone media player.

Bear in mind, these apps were designed for use with the Acer Liquid Stream, and there’s no guarantee they’ll work on our device.

You can find downloads at the xda-developers forum. There are a few more screenshots after the break.

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Most Android devices support a handful of media codecs out of the box, including H.264 and MP4. But there are a ton of formats that aren’t typically supported, including MKV, DiVX, Xvid, and WMV. And RockPlayer can handle them all.

The RockPlayer user interface couldn’t be much simpler. When you fire up the app, you’ll see a file browser. Just scroll around until you find the video you want to watch, tap it, and odds are it will start playing.

There are a handful of on-screen controls, including fast forward and rewind buttons, a play/pause button, and a zoom button. Clicking on zoom once will increase the size of the video, while hitting it twice will stretch the video to fit the size of your display — which works pretty well if you have a video that’s formatted with a 16:9 aspect ration, but not so well with 4:3 videos. You can tap anywhere on the video to make the controls go away.

Because most Android devices don’t have hardware decoding support for DiVX, WMV, and many other codecs, RockBasePlayer can be somewhat taxing on the CPU. You’ll probably have best results using a device with a fairly speedy CPU. I had no problems watching videos on a Google Nexus One.

Up until now the best app I’d found for playing DiVX and Xvid movies was Wuzhenhua Player. RockBasePlayer blows that app out of the water when it comes to ease of use, codec support, stability, and perhaps most importantly, the ability to watch videos in landscape mode.

Update: RockPlayer remains one of the best media players for Android with support for a wide range of video files. But since this article was originally published a number of excellent alternatives have arrived on the scene. Check out our list of 13great video players for Google Android.

Last time we looked at doubleTwist, the application already provided one of the best solutions for syncing your computers music and podcast collection to an Android phone. This week the folks at doubleTwist released two major updates that make things even better.

First up, there’s a new version of the doubleTwist app for Windows which includes an Android Market search function. While Google hasn’t yet launched a way to search the Android Market without actually holding an Android phone in your hands, a number of third party solutions have popped up, and the doubleTwist app search engine is about as good as any I’ve seen.

The front page is divided into featured, top paid, and top free apps. You can also enter a search term and click on any item in the results for more details. Unfortunately there’s no click-to-download-to-your-phone feature, but each listing has a QR code which you can scan with your phone’s camera to open up the download link in the Android Market on your device. It’s not quite as easy as using iTunes to download apps to an iPhone, but it’s pretty close.

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The second major release this week was the launch of a doubleTwist media player for Android phones. The doubleTiwst android app is available for a limited time as a free download from the Android Market. Once the promotion ends, it will cost $0.99 to download.

To be honest, the doubleTwist Android app doesn’t have many features that you won’t find in the default Android music and video apps right now. But it’s a lot nicer to look at. And more importantly, the audio and video players are together at last in a single app. If you want to play a video using the default Android apps, you have to open the photo gallery, which seems kind of silly to me.

The doubleTwist app for Android also lets you import iTunes playlists and it has support for podcasts. If there’s a killer feature though, it’s integration with the desktop doubleTwist media player. You can rate songs on your Android phone and the ratings will be copied to your desktop. Playcounts and ther data are also transfered.

Eventually doubleTwist plans to add support for wireless media synchronization and internet radio to the Android app.

You can find more photos after the break.

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Gmote is a remote control for your PC. Or rather, it turns your Android phone into one by connecting your phone to your PC over a WiFi connection.

Here’s how it works: You install the free Gmote server on your Windows, Mac, or Linux computer and create a password. Next you install the free Gmote app on your Android phone and enter the password. Now you can control audio and video playback, use your phone’s touchscreen like a mouse touchpad, or launch web pages from your phone.

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You configure the PC server with a list of folders where you keep your audio and video files. Then you can navigate to those files on your Android phone to start playing media using a custom version of the VLC media player. Videos play in full screen mode by default, while audio plays in the background. Gmote gives you a series of playback buttons that you can press to fast forward, rewind, pause, stop, or skip to the next track or video.

Want to watch web video from YouTube, Hulu, or other sites? Just hit the Web button to bring up a list of web sites or enter your own, then hit the Open on computer button to launch the web site in your computer’s default web browser. You can then hit the touchpad button in Gmote to control the mouse cursor on your PC in order to control video playback from those web sites.

Overall, I’m pretty impressed with Gmote. It doesn’t easily let you control third party media players the way that RemoteX for iPhone does. But for a free app, Gmote works quite nicely. There’s also a $2.99 version called Gmote Donate available in the Android Market if you want to help support the developers.

You can check out more screenshots and my hands-on video with Gmote after the break.

via Android and Me

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