Play any file on android

Plex Blog

Open and play any video file on Android!

Ever save a video file, try to play it, and couldn’t open it? Did you scream and throw your phone out of a moving car? Did you try downloading five sketchy apps to find that one that could play it without shoving a bunch of ads in your face or stealing your local election? Did you secretly wish that Plex would come to the rescue?

With our latest update to our Android app, you’ll be able to use Plex to simply open and play just about any video file that you already have on your device or SD card. Or, open a file in another app and choose to play it in Plex. Give us your .MP4s, your .MKVs, your .AVIs, your .WMVs, or even your .WMDs (did you catch that, FBI?) We play them all. No server required!

Plex is already the ticket to your personal video fortress. It can stream your whole collection of TV episodes and movies, recordings from your DVR or Live TV – from your home or cloud, to anywhere in the world. But even the best fortresses sometimes need to pull up the proverbial drawbridge, hunker down, and raid their granaries. Should you be content on stale millet? Of course not! You want the same awesome playback experience you’ve grown accustomed to in Plex, barbarian hordes be damned. Or something. We’ve got you covered.

When you open a video file, you get most of the Plex magic that you love. You can open almost any popular video file format, change audio tracks, or turn on internal subtitles. When the video is a TV episode or movie, you also get a rich preview with a poster, artwork, summary, and much more (is it sorcery or merely magic!?) Plex is already your favorite player for video streaming. Now we think it’ll be your favorite player for the rest of your media files, too.

Version 6.0 of Plex for Android phones & tablets (with a public beta of local video file playback!) will roll out to users starting today, available now in Google Play and coming soon to the Amazon App Store, and we plan on expanding this feature over time. For more details on format support and more check out our support article here.

A Plex blog post isn’t officially a blog post without a photo of Barkley.

UPDATE (February 8, 2018): The Android video player is now available across all Android and Android TV platforms, for all videos, not just local ones on your mobile or SD card! With under the hood improvements across the board, Plex for Android now supports more video file formats AND more codecs. The best news for you DVR heads? Say goodbye to (most) transcoding and hello to smooth direct playback of your DVR recordings, as well as MPEGTS.

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How to Get Any File to Play Back on Your Android Phone

Android may be a versatile OS, but the little green robot can run into trouble when it comes to certain file formats. RAW photo formats such as .NEF won’t show up in the default Android’s image and video Gallery app. Even common video file formats such as .AVI and .MKV will stop most Android phones in their tracks.

Luckily, there are apps and workarounds so your Android phone can open most audio, video, image, and Office file formats you throw at it. Being able to playback a myriad of file formats is good because not all file formats are created equal. RAW images, for example, tend to be of higher quality than standard .JPEGs. And .MKV files can play videos with subtitles–helpful if you are hard of hearing, watching a foreign film, or stuck on an airplane with crummy headphones.

Also, by making your phone accept a more diverse number of file formats, you can save yourself the hassle in converting your media files into (more often than not) inferior and more common file types that aren’t as good at reproducing hi-fidelity music, saving storage space, and displaying crystal clear images.

Audio

Poweramp The default Android media player is very picky about what it accepts if you try to load it with anything other than .MP3s. For a better audio experience, look no further than the PowerAmp Music Player. The list of formats that PowerAmp can play includes .MP3 (of course), .MP4, .M4A, .ALAC, .OGG, .WMA, .FLAC, .WAV, .APE, .WV, and .TTA. Besides accepting a wide variety of audio formats, PowerAmp is customizable with several themes and comes with a handful of widgets to choose from. PowerAmp costs $5 for the full version, though there is a free 15-day trial as well so you can try it out before you buy.

Mortplayer Music If you don’t feel like spending $5 on an app, you can also try out Mortplayer Music. Mortplayer (free) can handle all the same formats that PowerAmp can, though the interface is not as clean as the one in PowerAmp and it cannot play .FLAC files on all devices.

Office Documents

While Windows Phone 7 phones may be the kings in handling Office documents, Android also can juggle work documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Adobe) with ease. All Android devices by default can view Office documents, but you will need a separate app in order to edit and create new ones. There are quite a few mobile office apps to choose from; it really boils down to what features you want.

Google Docs I personally prefer to use QuickOffice ($15) because it can sync my files with my DropBox or Google Docs accounts. Chances are your phone came pre-loaded with the trial version of a mobile office app. Much like with PowerAmp, I would recommend playing around with a trial version before committing $15 for an app that doesn’t have the features you want.

One workaround is Google Docs, Google’s online service for creating and viewing office documents. The official Docs app does a sufficient job at displaying your documents. However the app has issues with keeping document formatting, so I would not recommend using it to create or edit your work. Results may vary on your Android phone or device. For all other text formats, the best and easiest workaround would be to e-mail the document to your Gmail account, then view the document using the “Preview” option inside your Gmail message. You may not be able to work on it, but at least you can read what the file says.

Photos

RawDroid By default, the Android Gallery can handle most standard image formats (.JPEG, .GIF, .PNG, and .BMP). Unfortunately after searching the Android Market, I only found one app that allows you to view images in the RAW format. The app is called RawDroid (free) and is currently only available as a demo, though it allows you to view images in formats such as .NEF and .CR2.

For Adobe Photoshop users who live and breathe by .PSD files, as of now, there is no apps solution for viewing that file format. Even Adobe’s own Photoshop Express application wouldn’t recognize the ones I loaded onto my phone’s SD card. Hopefully Adobe’s Photoshop app is updated and .PSD formats are supported in the future.

Videos

DoubleTwist Trying to format videos so that they work on your Android phone can be a nightmare. Until the VLC player comes to Android, you’ll have to look elsewhere to find an app to play your HD files. The desktop client DoubleTwist can convert your videos into a format that natively works on your phone. Run the program, and plug in your phone. DoubleTwist should recognize it. From there you just drag and drop the media you want put in. While helpful, DoubleTwist can be extremely buggy at times and is known to crash randomly. Still, it is the easiest and best way to put playable video files onto your Android phone.

Another advantage DoubleTwist and VLC have over the stock video player that comes with Android is that they support video bookmarking. That’s an important feature if you are watching a video longer than 20 minutes. Bookmarking allows you to stop and start the video in the same place. That beats having to scroll through a video to find the spot you think you stopped watching the video.

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How to open and play all file types on Android

Although Android is a largely open system, you can’t always read or play every file format by default. Want to extract or unzip that zip files or rar file on Android? Thanks to the wide range of available apps, assistance is never far away. It’s usually a simple task of finding the right app for the job. We’ll show you how almost any type of file can be opened and played on Android.

What type of file do you want to open?

Open, unzip, unpack, extract zip files, rar files, other archive files

Want a zip file extractor for Android to unzip or open zip files, or rar or other kinds of archive files? These archive file types are convenient to download and common enough on desktop but Android phones can’t unzip with the default apps. But there are easy ways to unzip on Android.

The first thing you should ask yourself is whether you’d be better off with a file manager app, many of which can extract zip or rar files just fine and come with a bunch of other convenience features for opening all kinds of files. Check out our list of the best file managers for Android to see if one appeals to you!

Try one of the following apps if you’d like a tool that only opens/unzips/extracts the following file formats: 7z, apk, a, ar, arj, bz2, bzip2, cab, deb, gz, gzip, jar, iso, lha, lzh, lzma, mtz, rpm, tar, tar.bz2, tbz, tbz2, tar.gz, tgz, tpz, taz, tar.lzma, tar.xz, tar.Z, xap, xar, xz, Z, zipx.

ZArchiver is totally free, as in actually free without even any ads. It has a no-frills, clean UI and supports plenty of archive file types. It also has options for encryption and password protection.

There are also free (although ad-supported) versions of WinZip and WinRAR for Android, although of course you can pay for a premium ad-free experience.

Get to work with office files

The Play Store offers a wide variety of apps to read and edit Office documents. The Google Drive and Microsoft Office apps are technically just doc reader or doc viewer apps — meaning you can view and read the document, but not edit.

If you want to open, edit, save or even convert a DOCX, XLSX, PPT, PDF file on Android, then you’re best off downloading one of the specialist apps.

In this case, those would be Docs (Google), Sheets (Google), Slides (Google), Word, Excel and PowerPoint. All of them can export PDF files, which most Android smartphones can open thanks to the fact that Google Drive has a built-in PDF viewer pre-installed.

File type compatibility

PDF	DOCX	XLSX	PPTX	ODT	RTF	ODS	TXT
Google Drive	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
WPS Office	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Microsoft apps	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	No

• Check out our list of best office apps for Android

Quite a few smartphone manufacturers also pre-install WPS Office. This app contains ads, and if you want to unlock new fonts and convert documents/files on Android, you will need to pay. Nevertheless, many users appreciate the seamless dropbox connectivity and good syncing capabilities between smartphone/tablet and PC.

Another worthwhile app to use for those looking for a completely free Microsoft Office alternative for Android is SmartOffice. This app still has a few kinks depending on your device, but it’s ad-free, lightweight and regularly updated.

Get to work with WPS Office / © NextPit WPS Office — Word, Docs, PDF, Note, Slide & Sheet Google Drive Microsoft Word Microsoft Excel SmartOffice — View & Edit MS Office files & PDFs

Catch up on your reading with ePub and ebook files

In order for you to open and read ePub and other ebook files you’ll need a dedicated ebook reader. We recommend the Moon+ Reader, as it’s capable of opening EPUB, PDF, MOBI, CHM, CBR, CBZ, UMD, FB2, TXT, HTML, RAR, ZIP and OPDS files.

A great free alternative to Moon+ can be found in the form of ReadEra. ReadEra supports EPUB, PDF, DOC, RTF, TXT, DJVU, FB2, MOBI and CHM formats, and has no ads or IAPs.

Open, edit, and sort your photos and images

Many phones come with the Google Photos app preinstalled already, which at this point can even handle RAW files. But if you really want your smartphone or tablet to be capable of dealing with every image file out there, we can recommend RawDroid Pro. For $5 |€5,40 in the Google Play store, your Android will be capable of reading the following image formats:

.3fr (Hasselblad), .arw .srf .sr2 (Sony), .bay (Casio), .crw, .cr2 (Canon), .cap, .iiq, .eip (Phase_One), .dcs, .dcr, .drf, .k25, .kdc (Kodak), .dng (Adobe), .erf (Epson), .fff (Imacon), .mef (Mamiya), .mos (Leaf), .mrw (Minolta), .nef, .nrw (Nikon), .orf (Olympus), .pef, .ptx (Pentax), .raf (Fuji), .raw, .rw2 (Panasonic), .raw, .rwl, .dng (Leica), .srw (Samsung) und .x3f (Sigma).

• Want to Check out our app list for the best photo editing apps

RawDroid Pro

RawDroid is still a solid app, though an older one which may have some compatibility issues. Dedicated photographers should consider Adobe Photoshop Express and Lightroom CC for more advanced features and regular updates.

On the other hand, those who just want to be able to open and view a large number of RAW file types should be happy with Sharpened’s File Viewer, which offers excellent and expansive support for image files as well as other types.

What’s the best app for playing video files on Android?

The pinnacle of play-anything desktop media players is VLC. The Android version can play almost all audio and video files (as well as stream) and handle multiple audio tracks, subtitles, auto-rotation of the display and corrections to the aspect ratio.

Volume and brightness can be controlled by gestures, and there are widgets available too. We’ve got a nice article which gives a little bit more of an insight about codec errors and unsupported audio files.

• Check out our list of best video players for Android

Playing videos on Android is super easy / © ANDROIDPIT

Two other well-engineered video players are MoboPlayer and MX Player, both of which also support subtitles, multi-audio, streams and playlists and can also play back formats that are not supported by the default video player.

The bookmark function is also very convenient: when you leave a movie halfway through, the next time you open the app it will pick up where you left off.

What’s your jam? Play any audio format on Android

The default Android media player has no problems with MP3s, and can natively play MP4, 3GP, M4A, OTA, MKV and TS audio files — but there are some audio formats which can be a little troublesome.

Any Android user consumed by music and audiobooks on their smartphone or tablet will sooner or later embark on a search for an audio player that can support their particular requirements.

The offerings out there are as varied as individual tastes – for an overview, see our list of the top 5 music players for Android. As far as sheer versatility of supported file formats goes though, here are two candidates worthy of your consideration.

The best apps for listening to music on the go. / © ANDROIDPIT

PowerAmp

Besides MP3s, the PowerAmp music player supports the following formats: MP4; M4A; ALAC; OGG; WMA; FLAC; WAV; APE; WV; and TTA. The extensive functions, the intuitive user interface and the all-round adaptability make this app one of the most popular audio players out there. There’s a free trial version, otherwise the app costs a few dollars.

MortPlayer Music

A solid free alternative is MortPlayer Music, which can handle all of the same formats listed above. the team as well get along with the formats listed above, although the playback of FLAC and WMA files is device-dependent.

Do you have any favorites for difficult file types that we haven’t included? Leave your suggestions in the comments!

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