HEVC, also known as High Efficiency Video Coding, allows you to compress high-quality videos to smaller file sizes, so that you can easily upload them on the web and share them with your near and dear ones. You might have heard of hevc.x265, which is actually a successor to H.264/MPEG-4 AVC (Advanced Video Coding).

If you are going to download a high-quality (like 2160p 4K UHD, 1080p/720p x265-HEVC AC3 etc.) video file from the internet, then you may see x265 written in the specification or the title of the video file. Once the video has been downloaded on your device and you try to play it using your mobile’s default video players, you may see an error message which says that these types of videos can’t be played or the format is not supported at all. In this post we are going to see how to play x265 videos on your Android powered mobile device without any problem.

Follow these steps in order to play x265 coded videos:

  1. First of all download this sample x265 4K video of Big Buck Bunny at 2 Mbps onto your mobile device. The file that you are going to download has following video properties:
    • Input Type : h265
    • Input Size : 3840 x 2160
    • Output Type : YV12
    • Output Size : 3840 x 2160
    • Decoder Type : GVC
    • FrameRate(Frame/sec) : 0.00 (24.00)
  2. Once downloaded install MX Player onto your mobile device from Play Store and go to Gallery (or search for the downloaded sample MP4 file using a file manager) application on your device.
    video format not supported

    Your device may show you an unplayable icon for the video you just downloaded in the above step. If you try to open the video file using your device’s default video players, then the players may not be able to play the file at all or the system may tell you that only audio data can be played as there is no video data present in the file.

  3. Tap on the sample x265 video you just downloaded and Android system will ask you which video player you would like to use to play this type of video file. Tap on MX Player’s icon and then tap on Always button present at the bottom. If you don’t want the player to always play x265 coded videos, then you should tap Just Once button:
    mx player
  4. The video should start playing instantly on your mobile device without any problem.

Important notes/features about MX Players:

  • The playback of a particular video depends on your device’s hardware also. Don’t expect to play x265 coded videos on a very cheap/old Android device using MX Player!
  • The player supports hardware acceleration. This means that the player can make full use of your device’s hardware (along with software) to perform various playback related functions using HW+ decoder. You can always select your decoder using the HW/SW decoder icon present at top right corner of the screen within the player.
  • The player fully supports multi-core decoding. This means that the player will make full use of your device’s multi-core processor for decoding purpose. This feature can be considered very useful for those who have bought a quad-core mobile device just for Messaging, WhatsApp, Facebook and YouTube!
  • The player also allows you to zoom in (upto 300%) and out across the screen of your device.
  • The player also supports subtitles with format of .idx, .sub, .srt etc. You can also set the speed and synchronization of the subtitles.
  • You can also set your own aspect ratio within the player. The supported aspect ratios are: 1:1, 4:3, 16:9, 16:10, 21:9 (2.33:1), 64:27 (2.37:1), 2.21:1, 2.35:1, 2.39:1, 5:4 and custom.
  • If you’d like then you can also set sleep timer within the player.
  • Feel free to visit the developer’s page of MX player if you’d like to download codecs for ARMv7, ARMv7 NEON, ARMv5, ARMv6 AFP, Tegra3, ARMv6 and x86 based devices.