Written by HEVC or High Efficiency Video Codec, a true successor to H.264 which offers roughly double the compression ratio for the same quality. It also means that a video file encoded with HEVC can occupy half the space of its H.264 equivalent with no noticeable change in quality, or the same amount of space with improved quality. Have downloaded some high quality 4K UHD or 1080p/720p H.265 files from the Internet on your Android smartphone or tablets. When you try to play the H.265 video with the built-in video player app on your Android device, you just receive an error message which says the types of video files can’t be played or the format is not supported. No need to worry, the following article will show you 2 workable ways to get H.265 played on Android smartphones or tablets smoothly.
Solution 1: Play H.265 on Android with MX Player
Solution 2: Transcode H.265 to H.264 for Android Playback
Solution 1: Play H.265 on Android with MX Player
Go to download and install MX Player on your Android device from Google Play Store and go to Gallery to search for the H.265 files that you have just downloaded on your Android device. Tap on the H.265 video, your 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. 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.
Reference resources:
https://techably.com/x265-android/12863/
Solution 2: Transcode H.265 to H.264 for Android playback
Although MX Player can assist you to view H.265 video on Android with no problems, however, for those people who own an old Android phone or tablet, it may be still a little hard for you to get H.265 files played on those devices. In addition, playing video on Android devices using third-party video player app will be more battery consuming than its default media player app. Therefore, for those people who wish to get H.265 files played on any Android devices with its built-in media player app, we highly recommend you to transcode H.265 to H.264, which can ensure a smooth playback experience on virtually any Android smartphone and tablets.
Here, you can get the job easily done with our simple to use but powerful H.265 decoder software – Pavtube Video Converter. The program has perfect input support for both 4K/HD H.265/HEVC files wrapped with either MP4 or MKV container file format. With the program, you can efficiently transcode H.265 to H.264 in various different file types including H.264 Baseline Profile Video, H.264 Main Profile Video, H.264 High Profile Video and H.264 HD Video. Here, we highly suggest you to choose H.264 HD Video with either 1080p or 720p resolution for smooth playback experience.
The program supports batch conversion mode, so that you can load multiple H.265 video into the application for conversion at one time. In addition, it supports hard-ware encoding acceleration, you can get up to 6x faster H.264 codec encoding speed as long as you run you computer on Graphic cards that supports Nvidia CUDA or AMD App technology.
For Mac users, you can download Pavtube Video Converter for Mac to convert H.265 to H.264 for Android playback on macOS High Sierra, macOS Sierra, Mac OS X El Capitan, Mac OS X Yosemite, Mac OS X Mavericks, etc. (Hard-ware encoding acceleration is not available for the Mac version.)
Step by Step to Transcode H.265 to H.264 for Android Devices Playing
Step 1: Load H.265 files into the application.
Download the free trial version of the program. Launch it on your computer. Click “File” menu and select “Add Video/Audio” or click the “Add Video” button on the top tool bar to import source H.265 files into the program.
Step 2: Define the output format.
Clicking the Format bar, from its drop-down list, select Android device most favorable “H.264 HD Video(*.mp4)” under “HD Video” main category.
Step 3: Enable GPU Encode Acceleration.
Click “Tools” > “Options”, in the opened “Options” window, click “Acceleration” menu, then check “Enable GPU Encode Acceleration” otpion so that the program will accelerate conversion speed when encoding H.264 to H.265/HEVC codec.
Step 4: Start H.265 to H.254 transcoding process.
After all setting is completed, hit right-bottom “Convert” button to begin the conversion from H.265 to Android device best compatible H.264 codec.
When the conversion is completed, you can then smooth play converted files on Android smartphone or tablets smoothly with its built-in media player apps.
