If you use an Android phone or tablet and use it with for watching the occasional movie or TV episode, MovieGallery is for you.

Skim through the movies on your NOOKtablet, Xoom, Thrive, Transformer Prime, Galaxy Nexus or anything else running Android 2.2 and higher (Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich) by using cover images rather than thumbnails.

What is MovieGallery?

MovieGallery is a replacement for the build-in Gallery / My Media app on Android devices. The stock apps are somewhat limited in how they display your movies. For each video, a thumbnail is created, and especially if you have a large collection of movies and/or TV episodes on your device, you end up going through a lot of trial and error to find your movie.

With MovieGallery, you can use cover images from websites such as www.albumart.org to display your movies:

Making it a lot easier to find the movie you want to watch, and a lot nicer too !

MovieGallery Features:

* 2 image display modes. MovieGallery can display images using a fancy 3D flip-style interface, or using a more classic flat interface.

* Adjustable background. You can use the default honeycomb-style background, or choose between flat black, white and light blue backgrounds. (not available in MovieGallery Free)

Note: currently the feature to select your own background image is not available.

* Plenty of configuration options to customize MovieGallery to your own liking, including mirror-effect, image size, name display, location display.

* Delete file option (new in MovieGallery 1.4, not available in MovieGallery Free). When you are done watching a movie, you can delete the file from your device from within MovieGallery.

* Connectivity to our free MP4 Streaming Server application. If you don’t want to invest in a large memorycard, or don’t want to take up all the space available on your device for movies, you can connect MovieGallery to our MP4 Streaming Server, and use its playlist feature to organize your movies, TV episodes etc.

* Streaming Sample trailers. (can be turned on in the settings).

* External video player support. If you have video player apps like Dice Player, Rock Player, Mobo Player or MX Player installed, MovieGallery will also display AVI and MKV files. Please note that because the actual video playback for AVI and MKV video files is handled by these 3rd party applications, we can not provide support with playback issues with these files. For best results, we recommend that you convert your files to a format that is properly supported by the device you play your movies and tv shows on.

* Build-in, feature-rich video player that uses hardware acceleration for video playback (works with MP4 and M4V files that are optimized for your device using conversion tools like DVD Catalyst 4)

MovieGallery Video Player Features:

* Remembers where you left of for all your movies. When you stop watching a movie, and watch something else before finishing the movie, you can just switch back and continue where you left of.

* Tap screen to pause video.

* Brightness controls

* Volume controls

* Zoom function to let you switch between different screen-fill modes for your video.

* Position jump buttons (jump 2-5 minutes forward/backward) that are configurable.

How does MovieGallery work?

The basic idea behind MovieGallery is quite simple. When you start MovieGallery, it will scan your Android device (NOOK, Xoom, Droid etc) for MP4 video files. Because MovieGallery uses hardware acceleration for video playback, it will only look for video files supported by your device. If you have a large collection of movies in an unsupported format (DVD, AVI, MKV etc) you would like to use with MovieGallery, you will need to convert them to a compatible format with a program such as DVD Catalyst 4.

If you have video files in AVI or MKV format, AND you have a player such as Rock Player, Mobi Player, Dice Player or MX Player installed, MovieGallery will enable support for playback of these otherwise non-supported video formats, and when you play them, it will use one of those players to play the file instead of using the build-in MovieGallery player. Because the playback of these non-supported video files is directly tied to the capability of one of these “other” video players, we can not assist you with any questions regarding these players. If you are experiencing playback issues with these files, please contact them for support.

After MovieGallery scanned your device for movies, it will look for matching (jpg/png) images with the same name. It will use these images for your movie selection. If you do not have matching images on your device, MovieGallery will display a thumbnail image.

MovieGallery Controls:

* Slide from left to right on the screen to flip through your videos.

* Tap on the center image to play that movie. If the video is in a supported format, it will play using the MovieGallery player, otherwise, it will try and open up one of the external video players you have installed.

* Tap and hold on the center image to have MovieGallery write the movie name on the image. If you use cover images, this is not really needed, however, if you just use the movie thumbnails, it can come in handy.

Tap the button to bring up the folder-slider where MovieGallery found video files in. If you organize your videos into folders, you can use this to just select one folder for MovieGallery to display, a TV series season for example.

Tap the button to bring up the gallery options:

* Settings takes you to the MovieGallery settings area.

* Back will force a re-scan using any settings-changes you might have made.

* Delete file (can be turned off in settings) will delete the current video file from your device (can not be undone!)

* Exit will close MovieGallery.

How to get cover images?

MovieGallery doesn’t include or obtain cover images for your movies (we are working on something though) so in order to make it look cool, you will have to find or create your own. For many movies, you can just visit sites like Amazon or IMDB, or websites such as albumart.org that have them. When you find an image you like, you simply rightclick on it, and select “save image”.

Amazon.com

IMDB.com

albumart.org

For a filename, make sure you name it the same as the movie file you want to use it with.

When you copy the movie to your device, also copy over the saved image of course:

After that, start MovieGallery, and it will display the images for your movies.

How to connect MovieGallery to MP4 Streaming Server?

I will write a full guide on how this combination works together, but here are the basics.

If you are unfamiliar with our free MP4 Streaming Server application, I would recommend starting with the setup first. This guide should get you up and running in a matter of minutes:

http://www.tools4movies.com/2011/11/kindle-fire-video-streaming-guide-part-2/

After setting it up and creating your playlists as you would like them to be, we recommend restarting MP4 Streaming Server to make sure the changes are applied correctly.

Once you have MP4 Streaming Server up and running, and you can connect to it from your device using the web-interface, start MovieGallery on your device, and go into its settings.

In there, scroll down to the bottom:

enable the checkmark, and then tap on “MP4 Streaming Server”

In here type in the IP address of the computer that is running MP4 Streaming Server:

do not include the HTTP:// part. If you changed the port in MP4 Streaming Server, include the portnumber (192.168.1.126:12345).

If you setup a domain name for your MP4 Streaming Server, enter the domain name there, but again without the http://.

If the server is not actually running, or if you made a typo in the connection, and you click on OK, MovieGallery will let you know it couldn’t connect.

After you enabled the server (or made changes to the view-mode of MovieGallery), tap the options menu button after you get out of settings, and then tap “Back” to rescan with the new settings, and you should be able to browse the movies you added to MP4 Streaming Server from within MovieGallery.

Similar as with MovieGallery, if you have (jpg) images with the same name as the movie in the same folder as where the movie is located at on your computer, MovieGallery will load them.

Movie Gallery is available in the Android Market in 2 flavors:

Movie Gallery ($2) : https://market.android.com/details?id=com.tools4movies.moviegallery

Movie Gallery Free: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.tools4movies.moviegallery.free

The MovieGallery 1.4 version has been uploaded the the B&N NOOK Appstore, and to Amazon’s App Store, however, due to the nature of their product activation process, it can take a couple of days before they are updated/enabled.