Free Media Player App For Windows 8: Player

Player is a free media player app for Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 devices which allows you to play back music as well as video files on your device. When you install and launch the app, you will be presented with an interface from where you can choose to open video or music file(s) for playback. You can choose multiple files also, and the best part is that you can also create playlists within the app. The app allows you to play back popular video and music file formats like avi, mp4, ogg, mp3, wav, wma, etc. The interface is well designed, and the app also supports snapped mode with equalizer support.

Player is available for free from the Windows App Store.

Player Video Player Small Size

Features of Player for Windows 8 and Windows 8.1:

When you install and launch Player on your Windows 8 or Windows 8.1 device, you will be presented with an interface which looks like the below screenshot.

Player Main Screen

In the above screen, you can see the music files in your Music library added by default. You can choose to play them by clicking on the file names under the Play Queue tab, or you can choose to open up a folder or a file via the Open or the Open Folder button at the bottom of the screen in the control bar. If the control bar isn’t visible, you can easily bring it up by right clicking on any empty area of the screen. Once you have selected any of your file for playback, your media file will start playing back almost instantly, and you will be presented with the playback toolbar at the top of the screen, with controls that allow you to play, pause, fast forward, or seek the track that’s playing back. You can see the screenshot with the playback toolbar below.

Player Media Playback

Now another great feature of the app is that it offers equalizer effects built in. You can access the equalizer effects by clicking on the pink colored button of a circular shape towards the center – left of the screen. Once that’s clicked, you can fine tune the equalizer effects from the on screen equalizer controls which are shown in the screenshot below.

Player Set Equalizer

Talking about video playback, when you choose a video file, it will automatically open up in full screen view with all the standard controls visible on the screen, and which auto hides after a few seconds. They can be re revealed by moving the mouse pointer.

Player Video Player Interface

You can click on the back button to stop the video playback and return to the main screen, or you can press the resize button at the bottom right next to the blue volume button, and the video will be resized to fit a smaller portion of the screen so that you can use the other features of the app.

Player Video Player Small Size

You can also snap the app to either side of the screen for multitasking, and the app is fully and completely usable in snapped mode as well! You can see the app playing back the video in snapped mode in the below screenshot.

Player Snapped

The app also lets you create playlists, etc. Overall, this is a well designed app that can be used to play back media files of a majority of file formats! You can also check out the Power.Media.Player and the One Media Player media player apps.

The verdict:

Player is a well designed media player app for Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 devices with a nice interface and powerful media rendering engine. The app works flawlessly on both touch and non touch devices, and I love it for that!

I rate the app a 4 out of 5!

Get Player.