This little trick might be useful for those who don’t need a standalone media player on their device and dislike the stock player that came pre-installed on their device. There might be a million reasons not to have a media player, saving space, privacy concerns, RAM shortage, to name a few. Whatever the reason, many users just avoid installing too many apps on their devices, but a Chrome browser is found on millions of them.
Google Chrome browser can be used as an offline media player, and it can play mp4, mp3, avi, mkv, flv and flv file formats, among others. Chrome lets you view a video in full screen mode and sports a very simplistic, minimalist set of buttons unlike media players with UIs stuffed with buttons. In other words, this trick works for those who do not listen to music too often, and just need a basic media player once in a while, but don’t need a standalone app.
The first thing you need is a file explorer that lets you copy a full file path, like ES File Explorer File Manager. It doesn’t have to be ES File Explorer, mind you. Check out your file explorer and see if you have this feature already. But for the convenience of the guide we will use ES and its UI. ES compartmentalizes your files in convenient tabs, like Movies, Music, Images, irrespective of their location, so this is another advantage of it.
- Open the ES file explorer, locate the file you wish to play in Google Chrome and long-press on it.
- Tap the three dots Menu button in the bottom right corner.
- Select Properties.
- In the window that pops up select Copy Full path. From there, you can tap Cancel, or you can just go the Chrome browser right away.
- Paste the file path into the address bar by long-tapping ans selecting Paste. Tap Go on your keyboard.
- This effectively opens the file in Chrome’s media player, offline. There is a full screen button in the bottom right corner.
Simple as that, hope this can help once in a while.
