5K Player for Windows 10, 8, 7 Just a video player

5K Player for Windows 10, 8, 7 Just a video player.

I have a friend who just got back from vacation and wanted to show us his photos, but his iPhone screen is very small and he really didn’t have time to upload them to the cloud for us to see. My point is that we can have selective sharing, but we still cannot transfer content from one device to another. If my Android device has a video that I want to play wirelessly on my computer, there is no native way to do this without downloading third-party apps. Similarly, Apple has a built-in feature to display your iPhone’s screen on an Apple TV, but you can’t do that on a Mac. Start advertising.

Enter 5Kplayer, a video player by definition, but there are some impressive tricks up its sleeve. It supports all major video file formats and has additional hardware acceleration that claims to allow 4K, 1080p video to be rendered seamlessly. 5K Player also works as a video downloader and supports YouTube, Vimeo, and most of the popular video platforms. The most impressive part they claim is DLNA and AirPlay support. We’ll test the water and see how far this product goes.

We’ll start with a quick discussion of DLNA and AirPlay.

DLNA: Digital Living Network Alliance) is an alliance of device manufacturers that provides a set of interoperability guidelines for sharing digital media content between compatible devices. Certified devices are smartphones, TVs, laptops, etc. You can share video and audio over Wi-Fi without delays or loss of quality. This feature only works between devices on the same network.

AirPlay: This is the proprietary protocol stack for Apple products. This is used to wirelessly stream media from Apple devices such as iPad, iPhone, and Mac to Apple TV and HomePod. This only works with Apple devices, but Apple has developed it as a third-party technology and other device manufacturers can implement it in their products as well. Apple uses DRM encryption, which prevents some websites that do not use encryption from airplay media.

5KPlayer Features

5KPlayer is more of a hybrid of several niche features and technologies that set it apart in the market. It plays HD video, DVD and music files. You can stream audio and video wirelessly via AirPlay and DLNA without quality loss, and download online videos from YouTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo, etc.

What’s so special about the glorified media player is the hardware accelerator in the software that takes advantage of the graphics card and processor to speed up playback, which means that even 4K videos run with this software without any lag or hiccups. They claimed that this player also plays 5K videos, but without special hardware like a high-performance GPU and 5K screen. We tested it by playing a couple of 4K videos on a MacBook Air and Windows PC, both worked fine with no glitches. The audio files worked fine too, there were no problems.

Download videos with 5KPlayer

Most of us consume video content from YouTube, Vimeo, and Dailymotion. There is no way for these sites to upload videos to your system. However, you can save certain videos offline for later viewing on the YouTube app for Android and iOS. While some of us are happy with keeping our content online, we have video downloaders to download videos. 5KPlayer allows you to download all files and save them on your system.

Also, downloading videos is very easy with this app. Copy the link from your web browser and paste it into the URL bar in the application window. It will pull up the available quality and save the video. By default is set to 1080p mp4. However, if you want to download a different format and resolution such as 480p, 720p, audio-only, or even 4k video, click on the Settings link to see a list of available formats. …

Videos are saved in a convenient place and displayed right in the app on the YouTube video tab. An audio-only option is also available if you just want to save the audio file to your system.

Stream videos with DLNA and AirPlay

The most intuitive feature they claim on their website is wireless DLNA and AirPlay streaming. DLNA works on all platforms on certified devices and is used for fast media streaming. 5KPlayer enables this feature and allows you to stream content to all devices on the same network.

I took my Android phone and downloaded a third-party app that is required for this feature to work. BubbleUPnP is a free app that lets you stream across multiple devices. It works by initiating a server on the network that is visible to all compatible devices. I have selected a device for streaming media content using an Android app. In this case, it was 5KPlayer and it worked fine.

What if I wanted to do it in reverse and play the multimedia content from my computer on my phone. 5KPlayer creates the same server on your computer and streams media to one of the selected devices. As I hoped it worked here too. I also tried with Smart TV and there were no problems.

The only feature I haven’t been able to test is AirPlay on Windows. Basically, it creates an Apple compatible virtual device to stream or mirror the iPhone and iPad to Windows using AirPlay. It had an option, but I couldn’t turn it on. I can only hope that the problem only occurred on my computer. So DLNA worked on my devices and Windows app, and AirPlay didn’t work on Windows, which I can imagine is a bug that will be fixed in a later update.

Now let’s move on to testing the AirPlay feature on Apple.

I installed 5KPlayer on my MacBook Air and launched it. (For some reason, the installation redirects you to the CNET site) Everything else is the same as on Windows and works exactly the same. The main function of testing is the AirPlay function.

I used an iPhone, iPad, iMac, and MacBook to test the AirPlay function. I downloaded the player to both computers and fired it up to see if they were accepting the stream from the iPhone and iPad. The screen mirroring function worked fine. Apple uses DRM encryption when streaming content over AirPlay. If any third-party streaming platform doesn’t support encryption, you won’t be able to view content on AirPlay. I tried to stream a YouTube video, it didn’t load in the app. However, I was able to play the video in Google Chrome and successfully stream it to 5KPlayer via AirPlay.

But what if I want to play media from my iMac on my MacBook. We tried every possible way, but the thread only ran for a few seconds and then suddenly stopped. The only thing 5kplayer couldn’t do was play media on the iPhone and iPad, or from one Mac to another.

Pros: Despite being marketed as a glorified media player, it has several advantages. It brings your media together in one place and eliminates clutter. You can download, play, and publish multimedia content without even leaving the application.

Cons: 5KPlayer cannot stream from Windows iPhones using AirPlay as advertised. Also, the transition from Mac to Mac Airplay didn’t go smoothly.

Verdict: 5KPlayer Video Player

5KPlayer is a decent media player that has a lot of features built into it. You can play video, DVD and audio files. The built-in video downloader allows you to download videos from most popular sites like YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, etc. You can stream media using DLNA and AirPlay, which is great, but some features need fixing. For example, the AirPlay feature did not work on Windows but did work on Apple devices.