Until recently, the Nintendo Switch didn’t have a proper video player although work was being done on various fronts to let you play on the Switch. First, there was PlayerNX in September which let you watch videos, with varying success, but it didn’t have audio so you were stuck with silent films. Then, Joel16 released a development build of NX-Shell with a rudimentary video player that worked much better and had audio but was quite lacking in the control department.
Shortly after the NX-Shell build with the built-in video player was released, Cpasjuste shared his work on the video player he had been working on that’s called pPlay. Now, it is by far the best solution to play videos on your Switch as it has good video support (works with most 720p files and some 1080p ones), subtitle support, HTTP streaming support and also a nice UI. Thankfully, Cpasjuste is still working on making it better and has updated to version 1.3 which brings along:
Improved audio decoding code which should fix some audio desynchronisation issues
A status bar with the time and battery level got added
A pPlay title image was added
Scanning the media folder is now more reliable as some bugs that occurred while pPlay searched for videos have been squashed
To grab pPlay 1.3, check out this link and install the NRO file on your Switch. Make sure you use an NSP HBL to give the homebrew ample memory for best results!