VPlayer is fast becoming my favorite video player for Google Android. The app supports a wide range of video formats including DiVX, Xvid, WMV, M4v, FLV, AVI, MKV, MOV, and MP4. But while the app can handle almost any video I throw at it, when I first installed VPlayer alpha a few months ago the user interface was a bit spartan.
Now the developer has released a Beta version of VPlayer, with a couple of major changes.
First up, there’s support for gestures. You can adjust the size of a video by using two fingers to pinch and zoom. If you scroll your finger up and down on the right side of the display you can adjust the volume, while swiping up and down the left side will adjust the screen brightness. You can also seek by swiping from left to right along the bottom of the display.
Second, there’s now a preferences menu where you can adjust things like the video aspect ratio, video quality, toggle gesture support, or change the root folder to make finding your video files easier.
There are three video quality settings: High speed, Medium, and High Quality. If you select High speed, the app should attempt to play any videos at all, even if they have high bit rates or HD resolutions. This may mean that you’ll see some distortion, but the frame rate shouldn’t drop. You can improve overall video quality by selecting the High quality setting, but some videos may not play smoothly.
That said, I still wasn’t able to play 720p HD DiVX files on my Google Nexus One without some severe audio/video sync issues. You may have better luck with different video formats.
VPlayer Beta is available as a free download from the Android Market. The app supports Android 2.1 and up.
You can find more screenshots after the break.
awesome app real rival to rockplayer. i was pleased with ability to choose audio tracks and smoothness of playback!
Update as of 01/26/2011: Not free anymore…