Ever save a video file, try to play it, and couldn’t open it? Did you scream and throw your phone out of a moving car? Did you try downloading five sketchy apps to find that one that could play it without shoving a bunch of ads in your face or stealing your local election? Did you secretly wish that Plex would come to the rescue?

With our latest update to our Android app, you’ll be able to use Plex to simply open and play just about any video file that you already have on your device or SD card. Or, open a file in another app and choose to play it in Plex. Give us your .MP4s, your .MKVs, your .AVIs, your .WMVs, or even your .WMDs (did you catch that, FBI?) We play them all. No server required!

Plex is already the ticket to your personal video fortress. It can stream your whole collection of TV episodes and movies, recordings from your DVR or Live TV – from your home or cloud, to anywhere in the world. But even the best fortresses sometimes need to pull up the proverbial drawbridge, hunker down, and raid their granaries. Should you be content on stale millet? Of course not! You want the same awesome playback experience you’ve grown accustomed to in Plex, barbarian hordes be damned. Or something. We’ve got you covered.

When you open a video file, you get most of the Plex magic that you love. You can open almost any popular video file format, change audio tracks, or turn on internal subtitles. When the video is a TV episode or movie, you also get a rich preview with a poster, artwork, summary, and much more (is it sorcery or merely magic!?) Plex is already your favorite player for video streaming. Now we think it’ll be your favorite player for the rest of your media files, too.

Version 6.0 of Plex for Android phones & tablets (with a public beta of local video file playback!) will roll out to users starting today, available now in Google Play and coming soon to the Amazon App Store, and we plan on expanding this feature over time. For more details on format support and more check out our support article here.

A Plex blog post isn’t officially a blog post without a photo of Barkley.

UPDATE (February 8, 2018): The Android video player is now available across all Android and Android TV platforms, for all videos, not just local ones on your mobile or SD card! With under the hood improvements across the board, Plex for Android now supports more video file formats AND more codecs. The best news for you DVR heads? Say goodbye to (most) transcoding and hello to smooth direct playback of your DVR recordings, as well as MPEGTS.