B Player

B Player for Android is a small-scale media player designed to play most video formats from MKV to FLV and even network streaming from DLNA, Samba and FTP. In theory, there's something appealing here: the idea of chucking across that 4K film collection from your NAS, so you can also watch it when out and about on your phone, only to find that your default player is choking on its codec or whining vaguely about not having access to network shares – B Player presents itself as a no-brainer solution, but following through creates a lot more misery than joy; particularly with regard to battery management and feature restrictions.

Network Streaming Without the Hassle

The application features UPnP, Samba, FTP, DLNA and NAS device streaming for when you don't want to copy files to your local storage before watching them. With the built-in file explorer, it's a breeze for users to search content on Windows shared folders (SMB), Linux servers (NFS), crops of home routers, or USB storage that is plugged into either Synology NAS devices with wireless gestures. The app takes care of offline and online playback through url streams, it supports a variety of formats such as mp3, flac (depends on the format the backend server is streaming), mkv, flv, mp4, avi… And supports video codecs like H264/Ogg/Theora VP8/VP9.

B Player supports hardware acceleration to ensure that video playback runs seamlessly on even lower end devices, smart enough to recognize and use any codecs available in order to reduce strain on the CPU. The gesture control works well enough: A vertical swipe on the right side changes volume, on the left raises or lowers brightness, and a horizontal swipe acts as a seek position control; standard fare for this kind of thing. It also supports subtitles from external SRT files and embedded subtitle tracks, downloading them automatically if you're connected to WiFi – but don't expect its search algorithm to turn up anything with perfectly synced lines and good suspense (beware: aside from Hollywood releases, often it doesn't). 

Spartan Interface Meets Technical Reality

The interface eliminates anything but the core: progress bar, play/pause and rudimentary navigation. No equalizer, no changeable playback speed, no audio delay compensation — things that competitors like MX Player and VLC have had for years. The app takes about 14.4MB once installed and you can thank the sparseness of it when you notice that even basic things are missing: Settings for instance, to change themes (how could an app like this not have black?). Drain on battery life accelerates during playback, a note buried in technical documentation that downplays the severity of the problem. Poor sleep state management: devices do not idle deep sleep when the app is closed (even after killing), causing on average a ~5% per hour battery drain. The lack of a correct exit approach leaves the app running invisibly, with the possibility to stop it only by force-stop in Android options.

Critical Limitations and Red Flags

The version of Android you're stuck on can cause immediate frustration: the most recent 1.2.5 release needs at least Android 4.4 KitKat, but appears to have stability problems on any build more recent than Android 10. The app is something users often find in antivirus scans as potentially problematic —likely a false positive based on the fact that it has network access permissions, though such lack of transparency on data handling is still concerning. The developer "Tunny" has absolutely no web presence other than a blogspot page last updated in 2022, with no support and documentation.

Network streaming is slow and has buffering problems even on excellent WiFi, especially for high bitrate content. The SMB used in this release does not support modern protocols, including no way to connect to Windows 10 or Windows 11 shares requiring SMB3 type security. DLNA discovery is highly unreliable, and often requires you to enter an IP address manually in order to search for a server which is found automatically by other apps. Most damaging of all, of course: no support for Chromecast or AirPlay or screen-mirroring mode, when these features have become expected of any media player. 

The Economics of Free

B Player has a particularly odd sales model: It's 100% free, no ads, no "premium version," no in-app purchases. This brings us to the issue of sustainability and incentives – why bother maintaining an app that doesn't make any money? The solution may be to open up development, as its source is rarely updated with the evidence of minimal maintenance from a lot of outstanding issues going back years. The most recent meaningful feature release came in 2021, with everything else being a simple version number change to bump up the app's Play Store visibility. It also doesn't come with other personalization options that you may find on programs such as MX Player, so there's no real reason to recommend it as a backup choice, really.

When you browse the missing features list, it becomes a media player anti-pattern: no playlists, folder-based playback support, background audio mode and picture-in-picture, playback history and gesture customization, theme choices, or codec pack downloads. 

Target Audience by Elimination

B Player is useful for a tiny sliver of the population, perhaps: those who need basic network streaming capabilities, don't give two shits about battery life, demand no additional features, and value small app size above all else. It could work as a hail-mary player for ancient devices with minimal storage, but even then old versions of VLC do more in the same space. The app is a total train wreck for power users who want codec support, anyone wanting to stream from modern NAS devices, audiophile types with considerations around battery optimization, or someone who just wants basic functions such as playback speed control.

More damning of all, though, it would disappoint folks like your next door neighbor with no interest in tinkering who just want a player that plays music without hassle — if the battery drainage issue alone wasn't enough to take it out of contention as a daily driver on its own. B Player is an interesting time capsule of sorts from the olden days of Android, when apps like this could get by purely on minimalism; but having stagnated and actively degraded device performance with poor resource management, it's no longer a functional media player so much as a monument to the necessity of continued maintenance and basic QA in mobile