Enable Hidden ExoPlayer in YouTube App for Android Smartphones

We have recently seen the post in which we discussed a nice game that is hidden in the Chrome browser. Google has many such small things that we are not completely aware of. One more such app is the YouTube app you use in Android phone. Google has introduced a new player in YouTube as, ExoPlayer. ExoPlayer is an experimental video player hidden inside Google's YouTube app (it loads videos much much faster), but made unavailable to the average person. We got to see it with the YouTube 5.5 Dogfood update a while back.

This way you can load your YouTube video very faster than previous. There is only one thing that you need to make sure is to root your phone. The ExoPlayer works only on the rooted phone. Use the following steps to enable the ExoPlayer:

1. Make sure you are using the latest YouTube app to load the videos.

2. Install any file explorer which has the root access, like ES File Explorer.

3. Open the file explorer and go to the following path: /data/data/com.google.android.youtube/shared_prefs.

4. Now open the "youtube.xml" in your favorite root-capable text editor.

5. Now add the following lines below, "<map>":

<string name="exo_player_activation_type">ADAPTIVE</string>

<boolean name="enable_exo_cache" value="true"/>

<boolean name="show_exo_player_debug_messages" value="true"/>

6. Save the file and reboot your phone or force close the app.
Note: If the app crashes, clear the cache and restart the app.

Enjoy the YouTube videos as fast as never before.

Cheers!!