Only Media Player with CD-R | XR BD-DVD BLURAY playback support through USB Drives for Android phones and Android TV
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| Source code | Closed for now. Opening it up is something we will think about in the future. |
| Releases | Public builds on GitHub and the Google Play Store are coming soon. |
| State | 2.0 beta. Features below are the ones built into the app; a beta can still have rough edges. |
Arix Media Player is a media player for Android phones and Android TV. It plays video and music from local storage, USB drives, home networks and streams, and it can read discs and disc images from USB drives (CD-R, DVD and Blu-ray media) like a small disc player.
It is built for the TV remote first: every screen works with D-pad, OK and Back, and also with touch and a pointer.
💿 Disc playback from USB drives
Plug in a USB disc drive or a USB stick and Arix reads it by itself, without another app.
- 🎵 Audio CD / CD-R: tracks listed and played from the drive
- 📀 Video CD: MPEG-1 video from the disc, track by track
- 📀 DVD-Video (also DVD-R / DVD-RW): main title, titles and chapters in the player menu
- 💠 Blu-ray (BDMV): main title playback
- 🗂️ Disc images (
.iso,.img,.udf): opened like a drive, with their folders listed - 💾 Drives and sticks formatted FAT32, exFAT, NTFS and UDF / ISO 9660 discs are read by the app itself
- 🔁 A disc that stalls is read again from where it stopped
Arix plays discs and images that can be read as they are. It does not remove copy protection from discs.
🎬 Video formats
Containers
| Family | Extensions |
|---|---|
| MPEG-4 / QuickTime | mp4 m4v mov f4v 3gp 3g2 |
| Matroska / WebM | mkv webm |
| AVI | avi divx |
| MPEG transport stream | ts tp trp mts m2ts |
| MPEG program stream / Video CD | mpg mpeg mpe m1v m2v vob dat |
| Flash video | flv |
| Ogg | ogv ogm ogx |
| Windows Media, RealMedia and more | wmv asf rm rmvb and others, through the universal engine |
Video codecs: H.264 / AVC, H.265 / HEVC, VP8, VP9, AV1, MPEG-4 Part 2, MPEG-1 / MPEG-2, MJPEG and more. Hardware decoding is used where the device has it; AV1 also has a software decoder for devices without one.
Subtitles: embedded tracks and external subtitle files, with style options.
🎧 Audio formats
| Type | Formats |
|---|---|
| Lossy | MP3, MP2, AAC / HE-AAC, Ogg Vorbis, Opus, AMR-NB / AMR-WB, WMA |
| Lossless | FLAC, ALAC (Apple Lossless), APE, WAV / PCM, WavPack |
| Surround | AC-3, E-AC-3 (Digital Plus, JOC), TrueHD / MLP, DCA |
| Containers | mka, m4a, m4b, ogg, oga, opus, wav, aac, ac3, eac3, dts, amr, awb, mp2, mp3, flac, wma, ape, alac and more through the universal engine (wv, mpc, tta, aif, aiff, dsf, dff, caf) |
Surround and metadata
- Channel layouts from mono up to 7.1 and beyond are shown correctly: 2.1, 5.1, 6.1, 7.1, 9.1, 11.1
- Surround streams can be sent to an AV receiver as they are (passthrough) when the TV or receiver supports it, or decoded inside the app
- Codec, sample rate, bit depth, bitrate and channel layout are shown for the playing track, with title, artist, album and cover art
- Audio delay (sync) control, equalizer and a bit-perfect mode
🌐 Streams and network sources
- HLS (
m3u8), MPEG-DASH (mpd), progressive HTTP / HTTPS - RTMP and other live stream addresses
- SMB (Windows shares), WebDAV and UPnP / DLNA servers
- FTP, SFTP and NFS addresses through the universal engine
- Remembered logins for network shares
- Automatic retry for short connection problems
🔐 Protected streams (DRM)
Android provides the DRM system for apps (the platform MediaDrm / Widevine components that Google makes available for player apps to implement), and Arix uses those platform interfaces for streams that need them.
- Widevine and ClearKey licence handling through Android's own DRM APIs
- Secure decoders where the device offers them
- Playback needs a valid licence from the content provider; Arix does not bypass or remove any protection
🧩 Universal engine for other formats
When the main player cannot open a file (an uncommon container or codec), Arix hands it over, with the current position, to a separate universal engine based on the open-source LibVLC library. It runs in its own process, so the memory is returned when it closes and the main player is not affected.
- Playback controls: seek, pause, audio track, subtitle track, speed
- It is used only when it is needed
📲 Open with and Share
Arix appears in Android's Open with and Share menus:
- Video and audio files from file managers, downloads and other apps (many extensions, upper and lower case)
- Shared files, several shared songs at once (played as a queue), and links shared as text
- Web, stream and network addresses (
http,https,rtsp,rtmp,smb,ftp,sftp,nfs, ...) - The real file name is shown for files shared by other apps
📺 Made for Android TV, works on phones
- Remote-first screens with clear focus, plus pointer (air mouse) and touch support
- Picture-in-picture, resume position, history and playlists
- Light on memory, tuned for TVs with 1–2 GB RAM
- Separate builds for arm64-v8a and armeabi-v7a, so each APK carries only the libraries its CPU needs
🛠️ Building
Build notes are in tools/README_BUILD.md. The build produces one APK per CPU type:
build/Arix-Player-TV-v8a-debug.apk # arm64-v8a
build/Arix-Player-TV-v7a-debug.apk # armeabi-v7a
Pick the one that matches your device (arm64-v8a for most current phones and TVs; armeabi-v7a for older 32-bit devices).
⚖️ Open-source components and notices
Arix uses these open-source libraries, each under its own licence (also listed with links inside the app, under Legal):
AndroidX Media3 (Apache-2.0) · FFmpeg audio decoders (LGPL-2.1+) · LibVLC by VideoLAN (LGPL-2.1+) · jcifs-ng (LGPL-2.1) · Bouncy Castle · SLF4J · Glide · Material Components · Gson · ZXing
Product, format and company names are trademarks of their owners and are used here only to describe which files the player can open. Arix is an independent project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by any of them. Use the app only with content you own or have the right to play.