Most Google Android phones and tablets can play videos in a handful of formats using the Gallery application. Common formats including 3gp, H.264, and MP4, but a few devices such as the Samsung Galaxy S can also handle DiVX videos. But what about FLV, Xvid, MKV or other formats? And what if you want advanced features such as slow-motion playback, or video bookmarks?

It turns out there are at least a dozen great apps available in the Android Market which give you more control over video playback and better support for a wide range of video formats. But that wasn’t always the case.

When the first Android phones were launched a few years ago, the Gallery app was your only choice. A year ago I couldn’t have made this list. But today there’s a glut of excellent video players for Android. Hopefully this list will help you find the ones that best suit your needs.

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Update: Check out our list of 13 of the best video players for Android

There was a time… just a few short months ago, when it was incredibly difficult to find a media player for Google Android which could handle video formats such as DivX, Xvid, MKV, WMV, FLV and RMVB. Basically the default Android video player could handle H.264 and MP4 files, as well as any other formats natively supported by your phone, and that was it.

Now there are a number of third party apps that support a wide range of video formats, including Rockplayer, arcMedia, and now a new app called VPlayer, which uses FFmpeg to decode videos.

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VPlayer is still technically in alpha testing, but it works great on my Google Nexus One. The app is about as simple as can be. Upon launch you’re presented with a file browser. Find the video file you want to play and click it to start playback. If your phone runs Android 2.1 and up, and has a fast enough CPU, it can probably handle most formats.

In the video window you can tap the screen to bring up a timeline and play/pause button. When you drag your finger along the timeline, the actual time will show up in large characters in the middle of the screen, making it very easy to jump to a specific point in a video.

When you hit the Home button to leave the app, playback will pause — and the video will resume as soon as you return to the app.

The only thing I’d really like to see added to VPlayer is a more robust file browser allowing you to access videos stored on a home network drive. The developer also plans to add support for subtitles. But overall I’m already very impressed with VPlayer.

VPlayer is available as a free download from the Android Market.

Update: Make sure to read our list of 13 great video players for Android phones and tablets.

When it rains it pours. For the first two years of Google Android’s life there weren’t really any all purpose video players for the platform. The built in video player is bundled with Android’s picture viewer and only supports a handful of video formats. But recently RockPlayer launched an excellent video player with support for a wide range of formats including MKV, Xvid, WMV, and DiVX.

RockPlayer comes in free and paid versions, with the free version including some advertisements.

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Today I ran across another Swiss army knife video player called arcMedia. It’s completely free — at least while in beta. It  uses open source FFmpeg libraries and can handle a similar range of video formats including DiVX, Xvid, MOV, Mp4, WMV, and RMVB. The arcMedia video player supports all versions of Google Android.

The new video player has an attractive file browser and a nice big pause/play button on the video playback screen. There’s also a button you can press to adjust the video size to fit your display, and a timeline allowing you to skip ahead and back in a video. There’s no fast forward, rewind, or skip button. The overall UI is pretty basic. But video playback is smooth and I haven’t noticed any audio video synchronization problems on my Google Nexus One.

The arcMedia video player is available as a free download from the Android Market.

Update: Check out our list of 12 of the best video players for Android

RockPlayer is kind of the holy grail of video players for Google Android. It’s an app that can handle virtually any video format you can throw at it — provided the video isn’t wrapped up in DRM copy protection. I took RockPlayer for a test drive while it was still in beta testing, but now the developer has released a full version of the app.

Best of all, it’s available as a free download for Android 1.6 and up. The free version is ad-supported, but you can get rid of the ads by clicking the “activate” button and ponying up $9.99 for a registration key.

The app comes in three versions, with support for ARM V6, V7, or an ARM V6 CPU with VFP instruction set. You’ll probably have best results with a newer device fast processor.

Controls are pretty simple. When you launch the app you’re presented with a file browser to select the media you want to play. Once it’s playing, just tap the screen to bring up a menu that lets you pause, fast forward, rewind, or resize the video.You can also click an information buton to get details about the audio and video formats.

Some users have reported that audio and video goes out of sync when playing some videos on some handsets, so I recommend taking the free version for a spin before registering for a full license. But for now, RockPlayer is without a doubt the best video player available for Google Android devices — with the possible exception of the Archos 5 Internet Tablet and Archos 7 Home Tablet, which both come with Archos media playback software.

Update: RockPlayer is now available from the Android Market. You can read about the full version here.

RockPlayer is hands down, the best video player I’ve tried for Google Android. The only catch was that the version I wrote about last week was a private beta that wasn’t available to the general public (unless you searched for a hacked version that had been released in the shadier corners of the internet). Today, the developer has launched a public beta version of RockPlayer, which you can download and install for free.

The beta expires on July 15th, and you’ll have to uninstall any previous version of the software to install the new version. But here’s the good news: RockPlayer Beta supports Android 1.6 through 2.2 and can handle a wide array of video formats including AVI, MKV, RMVB, FLV, MP4, 3GP, WMV, MOV, ASF, DiVX, Xvid, H.264, and RV40.

You’ll need an ARM v6 or ARM v7 phone to use RockPlayer and you’ll need support for VFP. The HTC G1, G2, and G3 are not supported.

If you haven’t tried RockPlayer yet, go download it. Now.

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.