Without the old-school CD drives, Chromebooks won’t play well with your physical storage. You can watch movies and play most video formats using the extension, even if your Chromebook is offline. To recap, downloading an extension will be the easiest way you can play videos on your Chromebook. Google has a list of Chromebook models they plan to release the Play Store on, and this will only work if your device is on that list.
If you don’t have the Play Store available your Chromebook, you may be able to force the update so you can access Android apps and install them without waiting.
This means you can use any Android media player on your Chromebook, as long as the app is integrated, of course. There are media players available on that platform also that will work with Chromebooks. Note that newer Chromebooks also support Android app integration from the Google Play Store.
This means you’ll need to download an extension for Chrome using the Chrome Web Store if you want to upgrade your experience and take it to the next level! Can I play movies on a Chromebook?Īs we discussed, Chromebooks can play your movies and videos using the native media player.īut it doesn’t support all formats that you may want to play, and the features are limited compared to a desktop player. Update: The built-in player on ChromeOS hasn’t changed significantly over time, but it can handle pretty much all basic media file types you can throw at it. The more customization you can do, the better experience you’ll have. That’s where this tutorial comes to play.
Most people are okay with the native video player, but some enthusiasts and movie junkies will want more control over their video player. We’ll go through them from easiest to hardest, depending on what suits your usage scenario.
I can’t think of a more feature-rich player that’s free to download. If you just want to expand your media player’s feature set, opt for VLC. VLC is THE player to use if you want universal compatibility for nearly every common file format on the planet- and some not-so-common formats.
Here a few options to play video on your Chromebook: So if Chrome OS’s native player doesn’t do the trick, what can you do? And that’s not the goal we’re trying to achieve, right? But then again, you’ll only be able to view your saved images using this viewer. On a side note: There is also a native image viewer and photo editor. Regardless, Chrome OS’s native media player will do the trick and play back most of your videos.īut it’s when you want to play some video formats that aren’t supported or you want to get more out of your media player where you come looking for tutorials (like this one). The media player does handle most video formats without any issues, but it’s pretty limited in what this thing can do.įor example, the media player doesn’t have subtitles support, can’t play AVIs, and also has some funky fullscreen bugs where it doesn’t fully go fullscreen. There are a lot of media players that just can’t wait to get onto your Chromebook.Ĭhrome OS has a built-in video player that’ll automatically play movies or videos you’ve downloaded to your laptop.