Just Player

Just (Video) Player, “Just Player” on your home screen, is a video player by Marcel Dopita, built on Media3, Google’s playback library formerly called ExoPlayer. There is no media library: you open a file or a link, and it plays. The README promises “No ads, tracking or excessive permissions”, and the app is released into the public domain under the Unlicense. On Google Play it has more than a million downloads.

What it does

• Gestures: swipe sideways or double-tap to seek (10 seconds a tap), and up or down on the left for brightness and on the right for volume. Pinch to zoom, from Android 7.
• Picture-in-picture on Android 8 and later, resizable from Android 11; a volume boost; fit and crop; a touch lock on a long tap.
• Audio and subtitle track selection, playback speed, and audio that, in the README’s words, “properly syncs audio with video track when using Bluetooth earphones/speaker”.
• After a video ends, it can delete the file or skip to the next one in the folder.
• Advanced settings, hidden behind a long press on the gear: auto frame-rate matching and tunneled playback for TVs, skipping silence, subtitle styles, which decoders to prefer, and a fallback for Dolby Vision profile 7 videos, which the developer’s own version of Media3 adds.
• Android TV: its own launcher entry and layout, with zooming by the remote’s up and down keys.

Formats

Video decoding is done by the phone’s own decoders, so what plays depends on the device; the README notes that the “Majority of devices also cannot handle 10-bit AVC”. The app adds two software decoders: dav1d for AV1 video, and an FFmpeg decoder for audio, so it can play Dolby Digital (AC-3, E-AC-3), DTS and TrueHD soundtracks that many phones can’t. Subtitles in SRT, SSA/ASS (with limited styling), TTML, VTT and DVB; HDR10+ and Dolby Vision on hardware that supports them.

This F-Droid build has fewer audio decoders than the README lists: no IAMF and no MPEG-H. F-Droid builds without the MPEG-H decoder because its licence isn’t free, and skipped versions 0.190 and 0.201 for that reason.

What it doesn’t do

• No box for typing a web address, no playlist screen and no background playback; the README says “audio only playback isn’t officialy supported”.
• No online subtitle search (see the questions below).
• No built-in network shares; it uses Android’s file picker for those.
• No chapters: after version 0.180 the app dropped the FFmpeg component that detected chapters in videos.

What it connects to

Only the addresses you play. One request goes beyond the video itself: when you play a video file over HTTP or HTTPS, Just Player asks the same server for subtitle files with the same name (.srt, .ssa, .ass or .vtt, also with your device’s language codes) and loads the first one it finds. There is no update check, analytics or crash reporting. It accepts plain HTTP and user-installed certificates, which helps with media servers on a home network.

Permissions

The app asks for little. One permission is unusual: modify system settings, which you have to grant yourself and which the app uses only to switch auto-rotate on briefly while Android’s file picker is open, to work around a rotation problem. Storage permissions are for its own video picker and for the delete-after-playback option.

About this file

• This is F-Droid’s build of version 0.217, from September 2026, for 64-bit ARM phones only; F-Droid builds a separate file for each processor type. It is signed with F-Droid’s key, while the versions on Google Play and GitHub are signed by the developer, so you can’t install one over the other without uninstalling first.
• 0.217 itself only updated Media3 to 1.11.1. Since F-Droid’s previous build, 0.180, the minimum has risen to Android 6.0, the app detects the character set of subtitle files with a new library, you can scrub the time bar, and audio passthrough works better on the Nvidia Shield.
• The 13.1 MB file needs Android 6.0 or later. Our scan found no trackers.
• The screenshots are the project’s own, from December 2022, and still match the player’s controls. The frames in them come from Blender’s open movies, such as Big Buck Bunny (© Blender Foundation, CC BY 3.0).
• The app is under the Unlicense; the FFmpeg and dav1d decoders inside keep their own licences.

CPU types in this build: arm64-v8a (64-bit ARM, almost every phone since 2017).

Versions currently kept in the F-Droid repository. We host and check only the newest one.