UPDATE: This new player has been officially released!

We’ve learned a lot since we shipped our first Android player. Namely that getting videos to play reliably on different devices using Android’s video library is next to impossible due to fragmentation of the implementation.

It’s interesting to look at other companies with way more resources than Pluralsight who are also trying to support video on Android. Check out the comments on the Netflix app, for example. Or the YouTube app. There’s a lot of pain with those apps as well.

If you consider the plethora of devices out there, then add to the mix people who use custom ROMs, and consider the much larger companies who are also struggling with this, it’s not surprising that we’ve not yet satisfied all of our customers with our Android player.

But we’re not giving up. In fact, our dev team is currently writing a whole new video playback engine based on FFmpeg. This is a major undertaking as we must port the FFmpeg library to work on Android, but we’ve had some encouraging breakthroughs.

Once we have something we can share, we’d love to have some of you who have been having trouble with the existing player to try out this new version and give us some early feedback. While I can’t promise anything yet, I believe we are within a few weeks of having something to share. In the meantime, thank you so much for your patience with us.

We are dedicated to making our content available on as many devices as possible now and in the future.