How to Play Only Audio from Video Files in Android

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Many of us have many videos on our smartphones that we watch from time to time. These are great when you are waiting for something and you have to pass time. For example, when you are waiting for the washing machine to finish the washing cycle in the laundry or waiting for the Uber Eats to deliver the food, you can enjoy some of those videos stored on your phone to while away the time.

But if you do not want to hold the smartphone in your hand to enjoy the video and just want to listen to the audio track of these videos, then you can make use of the free VLC media player. Here is how:

  1. First of all install VLC media player in your Android smartphone.
  2. Launch VLC media player app by tapping on its icon from the app drawer.
  3. VLC will scan and display all the videos stored on your device. If not, then browse for the video folder so that it can show you a list of all the videos.Play Only Audio in Android
  4. If you want to play audio from a video file, tap on the menu icon (vertical ellipses) next to it.
  5. You will see all the options for playing that video file, choose Play as audio from the list.
  6. The selected video will now be played and it will be visible in the notification bar of your phone.

Unfortunately, the same options are not available for Windows version of VLC media player and you cannot use VLC to play just audio stream of the video files. But an excellent alternative is XMPlay that can play MP4 video files but just plays the audio stream and as such can be used to play only the audio part of a video file in Windows. However, XMPlay can play the audio stream of only MP4 video files.

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2 comments

  1. Hi Trisha,

    Would you be knowing of a way to play audio only for an IPTV stream in android – essentially to save data. I tried it with VLC as well as Samsung Video player – it does play audio only but does not reduce the data consumed.

    Thanks,

    1. In my understanding, IPTV streaming uses M3U8 playlists containing thousands of small TS media files. Audio and video streams are not available separately. As such data reduction seems impossible unless the stream provider specifically allows separate audio stream. A particular IPTV service has to be analyzed to understand it further.

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