Outplayer 4+

Everything I have needed that other apps lack

No folder collapse ✅

Respects folder hierarchy ✅

Easy and intuitive sub controls ✅

Prefer landscape toggle ✅

Everything locked behind pay wall is truly advanced features. Subtitles work great out of the box and you have size and placement, further customization is truly just a bonus feature and I understand paying for it. It will play your videos out of the box. If you want it to play them a specific way in regards to encoding I completely understand paying for that.

I really like the way this app does it’s pay structure and will gladly pay next month with the first of my app budget.

I download a lot of anime and the other apps always try and use the filenames for structure. But there’s no consistency so it ends with just a giant list of all the videos. This app allows you to maintain your files from within the Files and have it display it perfectly.

Honestly this should just be the built in video player for iOS. If this was what the files app was integrated with that would be a dream.

Would love to see a feature for scraping metadata for files and have actual control over it. Often times just want the cover for a show or episode. Don’t want or need anything else changed.

Setting folder icons would be cool as well.

I will note, not sure if iOS issue but it did not create a Files folder until I created a folder from within outplayer. It also didn’t natively recognize the folder I created named OUTPLAYER in Files.

Flawless hardware decoding

Edited because it now has HDR support, yay!

Compared to VLC, this app hardware decodes more often than not with supported codecs (VLC sometimes inexplicably doesn’t with 10bit HEVC files [device heats up] that this app can decode with hardware). It’s simplistic design is wonderful and I don’t feel compelled to dive into the settings and micromanage everything. What would make it even more of an essential video player is if true HDR output could be added, or at least it doesn’t work properly on the SE3. There’s an argument to be made that the benefits of HDR are limited on a simple LCD display, but when playing back HDR-encoded content like Sony’s Swordsmith demo in the system Files app, it will display in HDR mode as denoted by an HDR icon on the top left and the peak brightness and color gamut seem just a bit better compared to how it looks in this app and VLC (which also messes up the color, presumably from not getting the color gamut right). Ignore what I said about casting, I forgot you had to mirror screen using AirPlay for that to work.

Developer Response ,

HDR has been added in an update earlier this year! And thank you for the feedback.

Extremely high quality video player

It’s rare to find such a treasure of an app, but Outplayer is handily one of the best video players available for iOS. The gesture controls are intuitive, the interface is clean, and the local web server is straightforward to use for transferring content. Attention to detail is given in small but delightful ways, such as the swipe seek pausing on +-0, useful for when you try to peek ahead bur returning to the current playback position. And the privacy policy is perfect. It states plainly: no user data is transmitted or collected. This app simply is an excellent port of MPV to mobile.

My only wish is for smb support with file browsing, since I try to keep my data consolidated on my NAS. So while I fulfill that need with another app for now, that doesn’t stop me from giving this app 5/5 stars and a full recommendation if you can deal with transferring media you plan to watch ahead of time.