Archos has entered the Android app game, launching its own media player on Google Play, for a price. The Archos Video Player, which in the past has been bundled with the manufacturer's Android tablets, is available to download from today. The app costs $4.99 in the U.S. and £3.99 in the U.K., and boasts a fairly lengthy feature list.
As well as hardware-accelerated playback for a wide range of file types, the Archos player supports streaming content over SMB (Windows file shares), UPnP media servers, in addition to USB storage. There's also a software decoding option, which can be used in the event that your device's hardware doesn't support certain file types. And the app sticks pretty closely to Android's "Holo" design language, with a large main view for content, and additional menus stuck to the left or right side.
Some of these features are offered out of the box on higher-end devices, but SMB support in particular may make this a desirable app for those with large, network-shared media collections.
Interested parties can hit the Google Play link above to try out the app, which requires Android 4.0.3 or later.
