Video + music player applications should be there on your phones because they can change your mood when you’re depressed or bored. Apps like Wynk, Hungama or Spotify stream music through the internet. They allow premium or paid users to download popular and latest Bollywood or English tracks for free. The downloaded file can be opened only with a particular application, i.e., the music player.
If you’re not a music freak, you can watch your family videos to overcome nostalgia, or if you have got a funny clip, a video player app will allow you to enjoy the clip. In my perspective, you should not download a separate app for playing video and audio files as they’ll waste your phone’s storage memory.
Moreover, having different apps for listening songs and watching videos can be confusing for the user. MX Player and VLC are the best video and music player apps. They’re available for Android, Windows Phone, and iPhone.
These apps are free, and they’re top rated. They can play any all types of media files. Millions of users love VLC and MX, and you can be their next biggest fan. Today, we’ve shared a detailed review of these two free applications.
MX Player review
MX is the best video and music player for Android. This app ships with wide range of options for the best user experience.
This Android application has a smart interface that displays the directories of media files on the home interface. It allows you to switch between hardware and software decoders when the video is being played. The app has swipe to fast forward feature. It also includes pinch and zoom function that works like a charm. When you zoom the videos, you won’t notice change in the video quality.
This application ships with over 20 color themes. It allows users to share videos and get subtitles from the internet. MX player supports crop, fit to screen, stretch video, and zoom functions. It includes sleep timer tool. It supports background play feature and network streaming.
The most interesting part of this application is the settings utility with which, you can select the file formats this app should detect on startup. You can also change CPU core limit or choose the custom Codec that you’ve installed.
MX has volume boost module and kids lock utility. It provides special settings for earphones. You can change subtitle language or embed them in your videos.
Download MX Player here.
VLC player review
This music player application is widely used on Windows computers and mobile phones. Videolabs Inc is yet to release a stable Android version of this app, but this doesn’t mean that the beta version of VLC will not work on your phone. This app for Android has better UI than MX player.
When you run it, VLC will scan your storage memory to find supported media files. The files that are found will be categorized into two types, i.e., sound and video. VLC supports all kinds of video and audio files that you might be aware of.
If you’re not able to play FHD, 2K or 4K file, your device might not be supporting resolutions within 1920 x 1080 and 2560 x 1440 pixels.
This app has options to increase playback speed, delay subtitles of the media file, increase/decrease aspect ratio of the videos. VLC allows you to lock videos. You can also add captions to clip when it is being played.
This free Android video player lets users sort files by their name, length, and date. It has an equalizer tool and 15+ sound presets.
Like MX player, VLC can stream videos from websites (you will have to enter the URL to the source). It also supports hardware acceleration and various video modes.
Download VLC player here.
Conclusion and Comparison: VLC hides complicated settings from the users whereas MX player offers a lot of options to improve their self-entertainment experience. Both apps are good, but the winner between the two is MX because of its enormous range of customization options.
If you love VLC, don’t worry! This app is still in the beta (testing) stage. When its stable version is released, you can expect some additional features that will make it a good alternative to J2 interactive’s MX. While testing, I played 720 and 1080p resolution videos. Both apps played the files without any lags.
