The Archos Video Player app hit the Google Play Store a few months ago, letting anyone with an Android 4.0 or later device (and $4.99 to spare) run the media center app. Now there’s a free version of the Archos Video Player which you can try before deciding whether to spend your money.
You can download Archos Video Player Free from the Play Store. It does pretty much everything the paid version does, but includes ads on the home and pause screens.
This is basically the same software Archos includes on its own tablets and portable media players, and it offers an attractive user interface for managing and playing movies and TV shows on your device.
Archos Video Player can download subtitles, movie posters, and other information from the internet, and organize TV shows in by season and episode.
The app also supports streaming videos from a shared folder on your home network using SMB or from a UPnP media server.
While the app was originally designed for portable devices, the user interface reminds me of a home theater PC UI, so if you plug your device into a TV (or use an Android TV stick rather than a phone or tablet), the video player should provide a decent full-screen interface. Archos says it also supports keyboard and remote control input.
Unfortunately, while the video player supports many video formats out of the box, if you want to decode MPEG-2 files you’ll need to buy a $5 plugin.
via Android Central
That’s a really nice-looking interface, but I think they’re going to have trouble justifying charging for some codecs when media players like MoboPlayer, VLC, and XMBC are free with full codec support.
Right now, I don’t think anyone supports MPEG2 files, so if Archos’ app does support both MPEG2 and VOB files, then there’s a market for it. If, however, VLC for Android supports MPEG2, and VOB, just like its Windows version, then, yes, few will pay for Archos’ codec.
Many/most Android media player apps support MPEG1 and MPEG4. The less popular codecs are Quicktime, H.264, and the new H.265.,
Since you brought it up, I wasn’t quite sure, but I looked up codec support on VLC and XBMC and they both support MPEG-2 playback. They’re both free, and they run great on my Droid 3. The GUI on VLC is so-so, but XBMP really went all-out on visuals, it looks amazing. I guess I should add that I’m not sure how many people are aware these are available, as they’re both in beta and I don’t think either one has made it to the Google app market yet.
http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Features_and_supported_codecs#Format_support
http://www.videolan.org/doc/vlc-user-guide/en/ch02.html#id291422
Is vlc for android out of beta yet – where we in the US can thwn use it?