An upgraded video player is coming to Chromebooks and it looks sweet

The Media App for Chromebooks has been undergoing a reconstruction for quite some time now. Dating all the way back to December of 2019, the new Media App has taken its time in gaining new, useful features, and this latest addition looks to be bringing a much-needed improvement to the way your Chromebook will soon handle local video files. With more and more Chromebooks coming with larger drives, easy access to external storage, and a hopeful return to far more travel just around the corner, a better local video playback experience is an exciting prospect for sure.

Spotted by Android Police, the new video player is only in the Canary Channel of Chrome OS 91 right now, so don’t expect to see this for a few weeks at this point. The updated interface is a huge improvement over what we had prior, giving users dedicated, floating player controls that includes controls for play/pause, timeline scrubbing, volume, skipping forward/back 10s, full screen mode, options for video looping, and PIP settings as well. There’s also a share button up top for the upcoming quick sharing that will be part of the Chrome OS experience soon, an info button for basic file data and a trash button for quick disposal.

Overall, the interface is far more on-brand for the current look of Chrome OS and the usability is far more modern than the current bare-bones player we have in Chrome OS 89. Again, we don’t expect to see this until Chrome OS 91 in early June, but we’ll be keeping an eye on it to see if it will move down the channels a bit quicker. I suppose if the feature is in good enough shape for launch, we may actually see it hit in Chrome OS 90. I’m not holding my breath, though.