Lightweight Video Player App: player(Video)
player(Video) is a free video player app for Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 devices that is incredibly lightweight. This app supports the mp4, wav, and avi formats of videos for playback. When you install and launch the app, you will be presented with the file browser screen which can be used to navigate to the folder where your video file is stored, and then selecting it. On some rare occasions, I got an access denied error that did not allow me to play my video files, but moving the video files to the Videos library fixed this issue for me even on files that showed me the error message.
player(Video) is available as a free download from the Windows App Store.
Features of player(Video) for Windows 8:
When you launch the player(Video) app on your Windows 8 or your Windows 8.1 device, you will be immediately presented with the file browser screen which will allow you to select the video file which you wish to play back on your device.
In the above screen, all you have to do is to open the folder where your video file is saved, select the video file, and finally click on the Open button in the bottom right corner of the screen. Once all of that is done, you will be presented with the video player interface itself which looks like the below screenshot.
You can see that the video playback is smooth and the clarity is great. The video rendering is done in a way that the player even while running on battery doesn’t drain a lot of battery, and neither does it consume a lot of system memory. If at all you wish to reveal the video playback controls, you can easily do so by right clicking anywhere on the player interface.
You can see the standard controls of playback including the seek bar and volume controls at the bottom, and the play/pause button at the top of the screen. You will be able to see another button right next to the play/pause button, and this button is the open file button, which quite simply put – allows you to open the desired video file by taking you to the file explorer screen.
Sometimes, the player(Video) app is not able to playback some video files, showing you an error message as can be seen in the below screenshot.
Here’s a closer look at this warning.
As you can see, the video player is unable to play the selected video file, but as a bonus, it also lists a quick fix within the error message itself! Just move your video file into the Videos library (C:\Users\(your username)\Videos folder) and the file should be good for playback (insert your username in the (your username) bracket in the path listed above without the brackets). Do note that the player currently only supports avi, wav and mp4 formats, so any other format of file will not be played back. Overall, this is a great app which plays back videos with relative ease!
The verdict:
player(Video) is a great video player app for your Windows 8 or your Windows 8.1 device if you are looking for a lightweight video player app that allows you to play back your video formats with relative ease. This app is truly amazing, and being ad free, it gets even better! The only drawback of this app is that it sometimes refuses to play back video files which are not stored in Videos library, but apart from that, it’s a really great app that deserves a look as it weighs in at just 200 KB!
I rate this app a 4 out of 5.
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