Many of you may have already heard of H.264 (Wiki page HERE) or AVC (for Advanced Video Coding), the latest-and-greatest video standard, widely used in everywhere where the best possible video quality is required with the least possible storage and/or bandwidth usage. It’s pretty much comparable to HE-AAC v2, the latest-and-greatest encoding in audio technology, which allows for quality (!) stereo Web radio streaming at even 24 kbps, and CD-quality recordings at 48 kbps. (Pretty much unbelievable, particularly at 24 kbps, with traditional compressed formats like MP3, WMA or even OGG, isn’t it?)
AVC is way better than the “old” MPEG-4 Part 2 or “ASP”. The latter is more commonly referred to as “DivX, Xvid”; in this article, I only refer to it as “ASP”, while I refer to the above-introduced H.264 format as “AVC”). While it gives you the same (or even better!) video quality, it is, in general, between 50 to 100% smaller and decidedly more flexible.
A lot of misconceptions or plain false info is circulating in the Windows Mobile, Palm and Symbian community; this is why I’ve found it extremely important to publish my AVC guide well before finally publishing my long-promised all-in-one Multimedia Bible.
Now, I take a look at whether you want to use it at all.
1.1 Pros and cons
First, let’s elaborate on why you would want to go for AVC files instead of the well-established and supported, plain, “old” ASP ones.
1.1.1 Cons
1.1.1.1 Battery life considerations
Decoding AVC, depending on the special AVC features used, the bit speed and the resolution, can require up to five times more CPU cycles than doing the same to ASP. In this section, I elaborate on what this results in in practice.
You may know it well enough that the more CPU cycles a given app uses, the less battery life you’ll have. This in itself may be a stumbling block for you.
Of course, this wildly differs between different CPU’s. For example, TI OMAP-based devices (particularly newer, latest-generation ones like the Nokia N95) consume far less power than Xscale-based ones. To demonstrate this, some examples.
A Nokia N95 playing an 320*144
* ASP encoded at 83 kbps (resulting in about ~30% CPU usage)
* AVC encoded at ~400 kbps (resulting in slightly less than full, 100% CPU usage)
results in the following power consumption:
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(the first half of the chart shows playing back the first, the second half the second video).
As can clearly be seen, the difference really isn’t much – about 280 mW, which roughly corresponds to ~90 minutes battery life decrease using the stock 950 mAh battery. That's about 30-35% battery life decrease.
(Note that I couldn’t make the same on TI OMAP-based Windows Mobile devices as it’s not at all possible to measure the current on them – “only” the CPU usage.)
Now, let’s see how other CPU’s behave in this respect. Let’s see the same test on the 624 MHz Intel Xscale PXA 270-based Dell Axim x51v. (Backlight level: as with the Nokia, the lowest.) In here, I’ve tested a 320*144 AVC encoded at ~400 kbps (about 30% CPU usage at 624 MHz) without any manual quality degradation and a 640*272 AVC encoded at ~460 kbps, without deblocking (near 100% CPU usage). For the test, I’ve enabled dynamic CPU scaling (that is, I didn’t run it on external power) so that the CPU could switch down to a lower frequency while playing back the lower-resolution video to increase the battery life to some degree.
The upper chart shows the power (in mA), the lower the CPU usage. As can clearly be seen, the power usage of playing the high-res AVC video at ~100% CPU usage required about 70% more power (480 / 280 mA) than doing the same with the QVGA-resolution AVC video. That is, while, on the TI OMAP-based Nokia, you will “only” encounter a 35% battery life decrease, on anything (!) Xscale-based, about 70% (!!!!). Yes, the (newer) TI OMAP platform does have a lot of advantages, one of them being not chewing through the battery when running CPU-intensive tasks, while still delivering excellent performance.
What does this all mean?
If you have an Xscale-based handset and have plenty of battery / a spare or an extended one OR you’re running a (particularly new-generation) TI OMAP-based handset (Nokia N95 etc.), you don’t need to be afraid of the battery life: go for the best quality; that is, AVC providing you with the best watching experience.
If, on the other hand, battery life is of extreme importance for you and you use a Xscale-based device, make you will still want to prefer ASP (or, low-quality AVC) to AVC.
1.1.1.2 You’ll be forced for (slow!!) recoding – unlike with ASP
First and foremost, as can also be clearly seen based on my very thorough tests, you in no way can play your familiar, “torrented”, full PAL/NTSC-resolution video clips / movies on current hardware. This is diametrically opposed to the case of ASP, where you, in most cases (except for the slowest TI OMAP-based Windows Mobile devices), can.
This means you MUST recode your videos before watching. You can’t just quickly drop your fresh-torrented, PAL/NTSC full-resolution (720*480 or 576) AVC’s on a memory card and just use CorePlayer (or TCPMP) to watch them. When they become available, that is; currently, on the Torrent scene, mostly, “only” HD (720p / 1080p / 1080i) videos are encoded in AVC, traditional, “low-res” PAL/NTSC rips are (still) all ASP’s.
Not even the best, most powerful handheld devices are able to play full PAL/NTSC-resolution videos (let alone 720p / 1080p / 1080i ones!). You must recode everything to either the native screen width of your device (which, again, isn’t the case with traditional ASP videos) or less and, in cases (for example, with VGA devices and/or slow (200 MHz) TI OMAP-based Windows Mobile handsets), you must deactivate some of the advanced features. This, again, isn't the case with "traditional" ASP files.
As noone not having a mobile device him or herself will deliberately rescale his videos (primarily meant for desktop watching) to a 640 or, God forbid, 320-wide one and, probably, even remove some features, which results in a visible quality decrease. With ASP files, you can just watch files originally meant for desktops on a handset; with AVC files, you can’t.
In addition, recoding, as opposed to creating ASP files, is a time-consuming process. In general, creating an AVC video takes 2-3 times longer than doing the same with an ASP one.
1.1.2 Pros
If you MUST use the least possible video sizes (because, for example, you don’t have an SDHC-enabled handset) with the best possible quality, H.264 is the way to go. It’s simply unbeatable and is way better than ASP at the same (low) bit speed. Again, it’s like how HE-AAC v2 compares to MP3.
Also, the MP4 container format used by the recommended Nero Recode makes it possible to have two (!) sound tracks in the same file. This was very hard to achieve with AVI files without some manual work. To my knowledge, there aren’t any Windows Mobile (Symbian, Palm etc.) related tools that let for storing two sound tracks in an AVI file. (It’s, technically, not impossible.)
Finally, once you learn how to navigate around in Nero Recode, ripping DVD’s or converting your other videos becomes very easy. No command-line tools are necessary – albeit, of course, you can use them too. For free, I should add – the most important command-line tool to encode into AVC, x264, is highly recommended and is of high quality. It, however, takes a while to learn – this is why I tend to recommend Nero Recode instead.
Nero Recode is, at first, seems to be a bit more complicated to use than well-known, established Windows Mobile DVD / video conversion tools like Pocket DVD Studio, Pocket DVD Wizard etc. Also, it’s a lot more expensive (around US$ 90). However, taken into account that several other AVC encoders are more than five times more expensive and you also get a complete suite of for example CD / DVD burners, the price can be justified. And, again, it only takes, say, an hour to completely learn to master the tool - unlike with x264.
(Note that, as the aim of this Bible is NOT showing you all the necessary encoding tools and tricks, I "only" discuss Nero Recode. It's readily available for download as a pretty much usable trial, isn't much overpriced and is MUCH easier to use than free tools. It's particularly because of the latter that I've chosen it to be featured in this Bible. Should you need another tool, look around HERE. I particularly recommend the decoder comparisons linked from HERE.)
1.1.2.1 Sample videos
In order to show you how much better AVC videos are than plain ASP ones, I've uploaded several of my test videos for you to evaluate. They're all 29-second, bilingual (English & German) and with two subtitle streams (English & German) and have been encoded for best quality (two-pass encoding with the best quality defaults).
In order to play them, you'll most probably need an AVC-compliant video player (if you don't already have a H.264 decoder on your system; for example, Cyberlink's newer PowerDVD versions do have a pretty good one - albeit in no way as efficient as CoreAVC, which I'll talk later. To play back these videos, it's more than sufficient). The easiest is getting VideoLAN VLC. Just download & install it (no need to fuss around with separate codecs - it contains all), start and open the video files.
320*144 videos:
87 kbps:
ASP (the worst - at 87 kbps and 320*144, using traditional ASP produces pretty bad results). As with the other bitrates & resolutions, this file is called "ASP.mp4".
AVC with all AVC goodies enabled - now, compare the quality of this title to the above-linked ASP one. Quite different, isn't it? Yes, AVC is WAY better at really low bitspeeds like 87 kbps. The file is named "default.mp4" - as will be the case with other bitrates.
AVC without bilinear prediction / CABAC support: this video has been encoded without two major AVC features to heavily reduce the load at runtime (and help speed up playback). (Note that I'll speak of bilinear prediction / CABAC later.) Nevertheless, even without these features, it's way better than ASP.
The same videos, encoded at 273 kbps and 320*144. As can clearly be seen, ASP produces much better results at this speed than at 87 kbps; still, AVC still has the lead, even without bilinear prediction / CABAC.
Sample videos encoded at three different bitrates (204k, 366k and 464 kbps) and at 640*272. Note that, with the second group, I've also made available two other videos. THIS one demonstrates the video quality degradation with bilinear prediction disabled; THIS with CABAC disabled. (Again, the 363k group also has the video that shows the "combined" effect of disabling both features - it's, again, named "nobilinNoCabac.mp4").
I really recommend scrutinizing these videos. For example, in the next scene at second 13 into the sample movie:
it's really worth checking out the following:
- the wall (it'll be "moving" all the time, producing a very bad effect, particularly with ASP and/or deblocking disabled)
- the effective resolution of the balls on the pool board (it'll be decidedly lower with 320-wide ASP videos than AVC ones, showing ASP not only sacrifies at quality (blockiness), but also at resolution at such low bitrates)
- the "blockiness" of the green pool board around the balls.
As you'll see, ALL these test videos show how much better AVC is, image quality-wise.
Now that you’ve seen both the advantages and disadvantages of AVC, let’s take a look at what players there are to play them.
1.2 Available players for mobile platforms
(Note that this guide doesn't cover the features not directly related to AVC playback - for example, AVRCP support, equalizer etc. because they can also be utilized playing back other content. They'll be all elaborated on in my forthcoming Multimedia Bible.)
1.2.1 Windows Mobile
1.2.1.1 CorePlayer
Without doubt this is the best player out there to play H.264 content. It’s by far the fastest, most compatible and featureful. If you’re seriously into H.264, you MUST buy it: it isn’t THAT expensive.
1.2.1.2 TCPMP
For this free app to be able to play your AVC videos, you MUST download THIS (originally linked from HERE; mirror HERE) add-on CAB file. Install it after having installed TCPMP. The CAB file contains a beta version of an early Windows Mobile CoreAVC port and the well-known AAC decoder already discussed and linked to HERE. (A quick note: CoreAVC is the main AVC decoder of all multimedia products of the CoreCodec folks. CoreAVC, on desktop operating systems, is unrivalled in speed – it’s even faster than some hardware-supported, much more expensive solutions. The speed advantage is certainly visible with the mobile ports as well.)
Note that there is another AVC decoder, the official ffmpeg codec, which is WAY slower than this beta and is, therefore, in no way recommended.
While the app has certain strengths (most importantly, it’s free), I don’t recommend it for serious AVC freaks – it’s just not powerful enough.
1.2.1.3 Nero Mobile Pro
Unfortunately, while the encoder (“Nero Recode”, part of the Nero 8 Ultra Edition) of the same developer is without doubt excellent and highly recommended, their Windows Mobile player, the commercial Nero Mobile Pro, is not recommended for playing back AVC content. (Or, for that matter, currently for anything else either: in my tests, other media players have turned out to be much more efficient and featureful in almost every area. It seems its only advantage is the native ability to play back HE-AAC v2 audio. To do the same, however, you can always use the free TCPMP with the AAC plug-in – and it’ll still result in better battery life than Nero Mobile Pro.)
Unfortunately, there’s no trial version of this app any more. While Nero 7 Ultra Edition Enhanced did have a trial of Nero Mobile Pro, Nero 8 doesn’t. Before a trial is (re)introduced, you can safely take my word: it’s, currently (as of version 1.4.0.9), just not worth the price (I’ve paid some 15 euros + VAT for it). And, it costs the same as the technically VASTLY superior CorePlayer – why would you, then, go for it at all?
As far as its performance is concerned, on VGA Pocket PC’s, it’s only usable with 320-only (QVGA) videos; of them, ONLY with ones without CABAC and Bidirectional Prediction. This pretty much rules it out as a decent player. If you do enable these (important) features, there will be a lot of dropped frames – on even the fastest handsets like the Dell Axim x51v.
640-pixel-wide videos, even ASP ones, badly lag; the AVC ones, in addition, have stuttering sound, even at the lowest stream speeds. That is, it’s impossible to play back VGA content under Nero, not even if you do all the recommended performance tweaks.
On QVGA devices, the situation isn’t better either: it’s only able to play the lowest-speed QVGA AVC movies. On my 400 MHz HP iPAQ h2210, the video was stuttering even when using a 83 kbps video stream (a ~230 kbps one was even worse). I haven’t tested it with deblocking-disabled videos but I don’t think it’d improve the situation.
All in all, stay away from this app. While their encoder (Nero 8 Ultra Edition) is certainly worth purchasing (if you don’t want to manually convert your DVD’s or other files to AVC with alternative tools like x264), Nero Mobile Pro is in no way.
1.2.1.4 In no way recommended, other apps
Philips’ Platform4 player (no longer developed, entirely abandoned, low-quality)
GPAC Osmo4/Osmophone
VideoLan – long-abandoned and has never really worked. When it did, it only produced at least an order of magnitude worse speed than TCPMP / CorePlayer.
1.2.2 Symbian
To play AVC videos under Symbian, your only real choice is CorePlayer.
Note that the built-in RealPlayer is also stated to be AVC-compliant (not only ASP). If it is, then, it must only be compliant with the simple Baseline profile, which isn’t what you will really prefer. I’m absolutely sure it’s not compatible with the Main profile, not even without Bidirectional Prediction and CABAC.
As far as other Symbian players are concerned, SmartMovie (as of version 3.41) doesn’t support AVC videos at all (it doesn’t even list MP4 files). The recently-released MMPlayer (as of version 1.01) doesn’t support AAC sound (see their official list of what’s already supported and what is planned HERE). This means it can’t play back AVC videos either because AVC videos generally use AAC sound tracks.
1.2.3 Palm OS
Here, CorePlayer is your only choice. MMPlayer doesn’t support AVC and, unlike with Windows Mobile, the Palm version of TCPMP doesn’t have an AVC add-on.
1.3 MP4 as a container; compatibility
AVC videos can be delivered in many so-called “containers”. The most widely used is the MP4 container, which, in addition to the video itself, can also have two (AAC) sound tracks, two subtitle streams and chapter support. Nero Recode supports these features. If you would really want to include two sound tracks in your videos and plan selecting your players based on these needs, then, you will find this section useful.
In the following chart, I list the compatibility of mobile players with these features.
http://www.winmobiletech.com/122007H264Bible/t1.png
As can clearly be seen, both Nero and Symbian’s RealPlayer are unable to switch to the second soundtrack. They don’t support chapter information either. The latter may turn out to be a letdown with direct DVD conversions.
Finally, none of these players support the Nero Recode subtitle format – unlike for example the free VideoLAN on desktop operating systems.
1.3.1 Matroska (.MKV) support
There is another, compared to MP4, more advanced container format called Matroska, which is especially popular on the High Definition ripper / Torrent scene (as opposed to “plain” DVD-only resolutions). Matroska files generally contain AVC video. CorePlayer supports these containers.
Note that, however, CorePlayer is only able to play back videos no wider than 1008 pixels. That is, it will NOT play back for example torrented 720p (meaning 1280-wide videos) content – most of current MKV files contain these kinds of videos. This is pretty much understandable if you take into account that most (particlarly QVGA) mobile hardware is simply unable to play back even 640-wide videos, let alone ones with much higher (twice the size!) resolution.
1.4 Fixing the frame drop problem
Unfortunately, as has already been pointed out, playing back AVC files requires a lot of computing power. On especially slower and/or (W)VGA or other hi-res devices, you MUST make some tradeoffs in order to be able to play back your AVC contents without problems (dropped frames).
In addition to lowering the resolution if you use a non-QVGA (read: (W)VGA on Windows Mobile, 320*480 on Palm OS or the screen resolution of communicators like the E90 on Symbian), you have four choices:
1.4.1 Using the simplest (Baseline) profiles instead of Nero’s “Standard – AVC”
Sticking with the simplest (Baseline) profiles means avoiding using the (standard) Main profile. This will still result in considerably better-quality results than with ASP, but, in my opinion, isn’t the best way to go because it’s definitely an overkill. That is, by fine-tuning the much more featureful Main profile, you can get much better results.
That is, if you stick to the Baseline profile (by, say, using the “Mobile AVC” or “Portable AVC” profiles in Nero Recode – as opposed to “Standard AVC”, which roughly corresponds to the “Main” profile of the H.264 standard), you will not have access to a lot of goodies that, otherwise, wouldn’t decrease your playback performance that much but still add a lot of additional functionalities and subtly increased image quality.
For example, if you don’t use the “Standard – AVC” Nero profile, you won’t be able to select HE-AAC for audio encoding, only the substantially worse AAC-LC. As has already been explained in the recently published 2nd Multimedia Bible sneak peek: crossfade / gapless playback, (audio) media compatibility and power usage, CorePlayer (as opposed to most other players; for example, TCPMP) doesn’t use considerably more CPU time for decoding HE-AAC audio; therefore, you’ll want to use HE-AAC with CorePlayer and not AAC-LC. If you, however, use a “dumb” profile, you won’t even have a chance to select HE-AAC.
However, when you do plan to watch your videos with TCPMP only (or, other, technically not so advanced multimedia players), you must keep in mind that the situation is pretty much the opposite. Then, you WILL want to switch back to AAC-LC by selecting the “Settings” radio button (highlighted in HERE, the mouse hovering over it), clicking the “Custom profile:” radio button and selecting AAC-LC as can be seen in HERE.
There will be other cases (for example, playing back AVC on slow TI OMAP CPU’s), when this (using “simple” profiles) is what you will want to prefer. Note that, again, the video quality will still be better than that of traditional ASP at the same bitrate – that is, it’s still a usable tradeoff. On other (faster) platforms (practically, anything non-TI OMAP-based, except for the newer Nokias, which already are based on a vastly enhanced TI OMAP), you will ALWAYS want to stick to the Main H.264 profile (accessible as “Standard AVC” in Nero).
Note that Nero Recode also has some other, device-specific profiles. Of them, many recommend for example the iPod 5.5G profiles for VGA users (it, using the default, automatic settings, encodes 640-wide video at 728kbps). However, I don’t really recommend it because the iPod 5.5G profile doesn’t support a number of advanced features (for example, CABAC and/or Bidirectional Prediction) – why not stick with the Standard profile, then?
Also, many recommend the Sony PSP profiles of Nero. I didn’t find them particularly useful either, particularly if you’re a high-res (VGA etc.) user. The sole reason for this is that it only encodes in low resolution.
1.4.2 Switching off Deblocking
Deblocking is a genuine AVC (not available in ASP) feature to heavily (!!!) reduce blocking effects and really increase image quality. It’s really-really useful, particularly with slow (80…120 kbps QVGA or 200-250 kbps VGA videos), while “only” consumes about 10-20% CPU cycles.
Disabling it will, therefore, increase playback performance by 10-20%. Note the following:
1. You should ONLY disable it when there is simply nothing else to do to increase performance. The two other (encoding-time) tweaks I’ll introduce in the next two sections, that is, disabling CABAC and/or Bidirectional Prediction, result in a much better performance gain, while retaining much better playback quality.
2. Some people state (example HERE) that switching off deblocking at video (re)coding time should be preferred to (plain) runtime switch-off. I’ve thoroughly benchmarked this and found out that, with the recommended CorePlayer, this is not the case (unlike what the original poster stated) - you won’t see almost any performance increase of not encoding your videos with deblocking support at all.
That is, with CorePlayer, where deblocking can be disabled by hand when you play back your video, disabling deblocking at encoding time isn’t necessary – there’re simply no advantages of doing it. With TCPMP or other players that don’t allow for disabling deblocking at runtime, however, you might still want to do this at encoding time. The speed increase will be pretty much similar to that of CorePlayer. (But, again, if you’re seriously into AVC, I simply don’t see the point in sticking with alternative and, technically, inferior products like TCPMP or Symbian’s RealPlayer – CorePlayer is THE fastest and THE best AVC player definitely worth its price.)
Disabling deblocking at runtime (again, only in CorePlayer) is pretty easy: just go to Tools / Preferences, select the Advanced page and scroll down to the “Disable AVC deblocking filter” checkbox. Tick it. Screenshots of this:
(Windows Mobile)
(Symbian)
Disabling deblocking at encoding time (again, if you do NOT use CorePlayer but (inferior) alternatives) is pretty easy too. If you use Nero Recode, after clicking Next on the main screen, click “Nero Digital Settings” in the left list (over the ? and the More >> buttons) and, after enabling the “Expert mode” checkbox under the tree view in the center (it contains a single item, “Encoder”, in non-expert mode, only allowing for switching between one- and two-pass modes) go to AVC Encoder / Encoding Tools. Then, just untick the Deblocking checkbox in the lower center.
1.4.3 Switch off CABAC at encoding time
CABAC is another, new and advanced technology used in the Main profile of AVC. Unfortunately, enabling it also consumes some additional CPU cycles at decoding time. Therefore, you might want to disable it – at encoding time only.
To do this in Nero Recode, go to the same AVC Encoder / Encoding Tools as was the case with disabling Deblocking, and untick “CABAC” (the uppermost checkbox) as can be seen in HERE.
Note that if you don’t see this checkbox, make sure you use the Standard – AVC profile inside the Nero Digital AVC category. In simpler profiles / categories like iPOD, PSP, Nero Digital AVC’s Portable etc., they are inaccessible (because they aren’t used at all by simple profiles).
1.4.4 Switch off Bidirectional Prediction at encoding time
As with Deblocking and CABAC, Bidirectional Prediction is another brand new feature of the non-basic profiles of H.264 (and, consequently, Nero). Unfortunately, it also consumes some additional CPU cycles at runtime and it can, as with CABAC (and unlike Deblocking), only be disabled at encoding time.
To do this in Nero Recode, go to the same AVC Encoder / Encoding Tools as was the case with disabling Deblocking and CABAC, and untick “Bidirectional prediction” (the uppermost checkbox) as can be seen in HERE.
(Note that you can disable both CABAC and Bidirectional Prediction at the same time. Do this if you do need the maximum performance. Don’t forget that, while disabling both results in a huge speed increase, disabling them both will still produce better results than disabling deblocking. Only disable the latter when you’ve already disabled the former two and there still are dropped frames. If it still isn’t working, then, consider using a lower resolution or entirely switching from AVC to the traditional ASP.)
1.4.5 Effects of en/disabling deblocking, CABAC and Bidirectional Prediction
The following chart shows the effect on performance of doing all these hacks. The results have all been measured using the current version (1.1.1 on Windows Mobile, b2 on Symbian) of CorePlayer. The test machine was a VGA Dell Axim x51v – video-wise, probably the fastest handheld around.
The first chart shows the performance gain of not only the combined disabling of CABAC and Bidirectional Prediction, but also the separated results. As can clearly be seen, the performance gain of not using CABAC roughly equals to disabling deblocking - while, again, it maintains MUCH better visual quality and should ALWAYS be preferred over disabling deblocking. The latter should always be the last resort to (try to) get rid of (heavily) dropped frames or bad performance. Disabling Bidirectional Prediction, on the other hand, results in a much higher performance gain: it’s like disabling deblocking AND CABAC at the same time.
The chart also shows the results of disabling the Intel 2700g hardware accelerator acceleration (a single checkbox in CorePlayer). As can clearly be seen, 2700g helps a LOT when playing back ASP videos – particularly high-resolution ones. With the latter, the performance gain can be even 60%. As the Intel 2700g doesn’t help at decoding AVC at all, the results would have been the same in both cases.
I’ve used several test videos with either 640 or 320 width. They all had two HE-AAC soundtracks (default of the Standard – AVC profile of Nero – as opposed to lower-quality profiles, where only AAC-LC is accessible) and two subtitle streams. The latter, of course, (still?) aren’t displayed by CorePlayer. All of the videos have been encoded using two passes and all optimizations. Note that removing one of the sound tracks and the two subtitle streams wouldn’t have resulted in a major speed gain (probably a 0.5% one – at most), which will also be shown in a later chart.
Note that most AVC benchmarks contain two values. The first shows the benchmark with enabled deblocking; the second (after a slash) with disabled one. (Again and again, disabling deblocking, unless your source is high-quality, is NOT recommended. Try creating your AVC videos with either bilinear prediction or CABAC (or both) disabled if you REALLY need some additional speed – the quality degradation will be far less visible than without deblocking.)
The chart also shows the effect of the bitstream speed on the decoding efficiency. It’s a well-known fact that the faster the bitstream, the more CPU it takes to decode it. As can clearly be seen, there is some difference. For example, a 204 kbps 640*272 AVC stream can be decoded with a 91% benchmark, while, when using a 464 kbps stream, this decreases to 82%, which, visually, is much worse (about two times more dropped frames). Fortunately, as AVC behaves extraordinary good at low bitrates (again, just like HE-AAC v2 in sound encoding), you will want to strive for using as low stream speeds as possible. Again, a 204 kbps 640*272 AVC stream is pretty much enjoyable – no need for using a faster stream. Let me emphasize again: a faster stream will only decrease performance.
1.4.5.1 Some other, bitrate-dependent tests
To prove my point and show how increasing the video stream speed decreases performance, I’ve made several other, bitrate-dependent tests with fixed streams. Note that, in here, the stream was a 640 * 384 (with QVGA, 320 * 192) one – that is, considerably thicker than the 640 * 272 stream used in the previous test. The results certainly show this has reduced the performance.
HP iPAQ hx4700:
HP iPAQ h2210:
HTC Universal:
Nokia N95:
1.4.5.2 Dell Axim x51v + TCPMP
The following chart shows how the x51v behaves with TCPMP (the free and, for playing back AVC files, not really recommended predecessor of CorePlayer). In here, I’ve benchmarked both the beta CoreAVC codec (the third and fourth columns) and the official (and much slower) ffmpeg codec (fifth column). As can clearly be seen, the ffmpeg codec is about 100% slower than the beta CoreAVC and the latter is about 26% slower than the one in the commercial CorePlayer. Note that this 26% also contains the additional slowdown introduced by TCPMP’s far less efficient HE-AAC audio decoder. With an AAC-LC test video, the difference wouldn’t have been this bad. (Again, as can be seen in HERE, the (old) HE-AAC decoder of TCPMP is 2.5 times slower than the AAC-LC one. As opposed to the CorePlayer case: There is almost no difference with CorePlayer’s AAC decoders.)
1.4.5.3 Other VGA Pocket PC’s
Let’s continue with some other test devices – in this section, Windows Mobile only. Let’s take a look at two other VGA devices, the 624 MHz HP iPAQ hx4700 (with an ATi chipset) and the 520 MHz HTC Universal phone (the latter without any hardware graphics accelerator). The tests, of course, have all been made with the latest CorePlayer (TCPMP was only used with x51v to show how slower it is compared to CorePlayer). As can clearly be seen, in AVC mode, the two devices performed equally well – and slightly (but not much!) worse than the “speedking” Dell Axim x51v. This also means if you have any of these devices (just like me), you may want to prefer them to x51v because of the far better-quality screen (much better color reproduction, no polarization problems etc.)
As can also be seen in these charts, the lack of any (previous-generation like the Intel 2700g in the Dell Axim x51v or the ATI chipset used in the hx4700) hardware accelerator in a VGA device isn’t a problem. The hardware acceleration of ATI and Intel 2700g (currently, the two chipsets supported by CorePlayer and TCPMP – no support for GoForce 5500 and Qualcomm 7200 yet) only helps ASP playback, not AVC one. It’s only the latest Marvell (ex-Intel) XScale 3xx (Monahan) series that has support for AVC decoding – not earlier designs. (Unfortunately, currently, only the brand new iPAQ’s (will) have the new Xscale CPU’s and nothing else.)
This also explains why, it’s only in the not recommended, old ASP mode that the (hardware accelerated) Dell and iPAQ are considerably faster than the non-accelerated Universal (or, the same devices themselves with disabled acceleration).
HTC Universal:
HP iPAQ hx4700:
Note that the “Video” setting dialog also contains a “Video quality” drop-down list. It should never be used because in the “Medium” setting, it severely degrades video quality (it effectively halves (!) the original (!) resolution – that is, VGA source becomes QVGA) and, in “Low” setting, almost noting will be visible. The speed gain its usage results in is pretty low too. Finally, it only has an effect on non-AVC (for example, ASP) source; this is why I’ve added the MQ (“Medium Quality”) remarks in there. (For example, (MQ: 319) with the HTC Universal playing back a 204 kbps VGA movie means 319% benchmark when the video quality is set to Medium.)
Halving the original resolution means that, if you play back a VGA ASP movie on a QVGA device that supports the quality setting, in general, you can give a try to switching to Medium quality – you won’t see much image degradation (as opposed to what you would see on a VGA device). This especially pays off if, otherwise, you couldn’t play back the video without dropped frames.
1.4.5.4 QVGA Pocket PC’s and MS Smartphones
Now, from VGA Pocket PC’s, let’s move to QVGA devices (Pocket PC’s and MS Smartphones alike): the pretty old, WM2003 HP iPAQ 2210 (run by a 400 MHz Intel Xscale PXA-255) and the new, low-speed HTC Vox (s710) MS Smartphone, run by a 200 MHz TI OMAP CPU. (Note that, as far as other TI OMAP-based models are concerned, I’ve also benchmarked the HTC Wizard. I’ll show the results in a later chart.)
HP iPAQ 2210:
HTC Vox / s710:
As can clearly be seen, the 400 MHz iPAQ 2210 is just able to play back QVGA movies without having to resort to manual quality degradation (bilinear prediction / CABAC / deblocking). With the 200 MHz TI OMAP Vox, the situation is far worse – you cannot watch QVGA-width AVC videos on Windows Mobile models based on this CPU without manually decreasing the quality in encoding time (in runtime, just disabling deblocking won’t suffice).
1.4.5.5 Nokia N95
Finally, let’s see how probably the best multimedia smartphone of today, the TI OMAP-based (running at 330 MHz) Nokia N95 (firmware version v20, which is a bit faster at video playback (too) than v12) fares:
As can clearly be seen, it’s just able to play back 640*272 ASP videos without dropped frames – unlike the Vox or anything Windows Mobile based on the TI OMAP platform (without heavy overclocking).
1.4.5.6 Note that…
I haven’t benchmarked any Qualcomm MS7200-based devices because the next, soon-to-be-released, 1.2 version of CorePlayer will have much better support for it. Also, GoForce 4000 / 5500-based devices like the O2 XDA Flame are promised hardware support sometimes next year – see THIS for more info. Therefore, I haven’t tested them either. According to serveral users, both Acer (GoForce 4000) and the Flame (5500) have severe problems with playing back video – as is the case with the Qualcomm MS7200-based devices right now.
The source video I used was a 640*272 / 320*144 one – that is, a traditional 2.39:1 (35 mm anamorphic / Panavision / 'Scope) movie. With, vertically, considerably bigger movies (1.85:1, 16:9 (1.78:1) or even plain 4:3 – see THIS for more info) will result in a somewhat worse results.
For example, with a real 4:3 (640*480, VGA) 550 kbps ASP source, the Nokia N95 benchmarks at about 93%, as opposed to the ~111% of the “thin” 2.39:1 movie resized to 640*272 (keeping the aspect ratio).
1.4.6 Other tweaking
I’ve also thoroughly tested the performance gain using other checkboxes in the already-known (it’s there that you need to disable deblocking) Advanced tab of CorePlayer. Note that the test video was a fast one (the Standard - AVC 640-wide one was 1995 kbps, the Standard 320-wide one was 1468 kbps etc.); with much lower (and, therefore, much more recommended) bitrates (between 80…450 kbps, depending on the resolution), the absolute numbers would have been considerably higher, while the relative rations would have stayed approximately the same.
As can clearly be seen, trying to increase the performance with the other, Advanced checkboxes are pretty much futile. As a rule of thumb, it’s only the three parameters (Deblocking both runtime and encoding time and CABAC / Bidirectional Prediction at encoding time) that you should pay attention to. Also note that, by default, CorePlayer defaults to the best and most effective playback method (video output). It’s only with some ATI-based devices that you MAY want to override its decisions, should you encounter for example the infamous greenish effect.
1.4.7 Resolution-dependent benchmarks
I’ve also made some resolution-dependent benchmarks to see how the players behave with non-QVGA / VGA source videos. In this test, I’ve let Nero Recode set the target resolution depending on the manually set bitrate.
Incidentally, this (Nero Recode itself decides the best resolution for a given bitrate) is the default how encoding works. This may be an overkill in a lot of cases. For example, even a 200 kbps 640*272 AVC stream looks great, while Nero Recode insists of only allowing for this size at the bitrate of 533 kbps. This is a big overkill if your premium concern is storage space. Again and again, even 200 kbps 640-wide streams can look great, particularly those of “traditional” “35 mm” (2:39:1) movies. No need for wasting almost three times more storage on the video stream.
Therefore, if you do want to ALWAYS force the Nero Recode to convert your videos / DVD’s to either 320- or 640-wide videos, you must manually click the Video button (the lowermost large button on the right), go to the Resize tab and fill in both the horizontal and vertical size. In THIS screenshot, I’ve filled in 640 for the horizontal and 272 the vertical size. Uncheck the “Letterboxing” checkbox (if ticked).
Note that, as there’s no “keep aspect ratio” functionality in here, you must manually compute the vertical size, based on the original one. That is, if the original is, say, 720*300, then, you’ll need to
1, divide 300 (the original size) by the result of 720/640 = 1.125 (or, if you plan to watch the video on a QVGA screen, 720/320 = 2.25). The result is 266 (or, with the QVGA case, 133).
2, now, you’ll need to find the least multiple of 16 closest to the result. To find it, divide 266 (133) by 16 and round up. The results are:
266 / 16 = 16.625; rounded up: 17
133 / 16 = 8.3125; rounded up: 9
3, multiply the rounded-up integer with 16 (272 and 144, respectively); this will be the new vertical size.
Now, the chart:
With exactly the same video files (and, in addition, with a one pass, one soundtrack, no subtitle file and a iPod 5.5G –specific one to see whether they result in a better performance), I’ve also made some other tests with the three VGA devices to see how they play them back. As can clearly be seen, there isn’t much difference.
First, the results clearly show including a second soundtrack and/or subtitles doesn’t really cause any real speed hit. That is, feel free to do it if you’re either a language buff (and like watching movies in different languages) or would like to listen to the commentary soundtrack, if any. (Note that, currently, few desktop-based media players can display the Nero subtitle streams: of course, Nero’s own Showtime and VideoLAN.)
As can also be clearly seen (just compare the 640-wide result to that of the 624 and the 688-wide: as can clearly be seen, there isn’t much difference), the overhead caused by having to resize the video to (horizontally) fill in the entire screen is pretty low (as opposed to what some people state).
Still, as you won’t take advantage of the extra 80 pixels of the original 720-wide video, there isn’t much point in NOT reconverting it. Again and again, with AVC videos and current hardware (that is, before the VGA iPAQ 2xx series with the Marvel Xscale CPU’s hits the street and CorePlayer receives support for it), you MUST convert your videos to be enjoyable on your handsets – as opposed to most ASP videos played on most Windows Mobile / hi-end Symbian handsets.
The other direction (not using a full 640-wide stream), on the other hand, can pay off. If you don’t want to disable any of the special AVC features (deblocking / CABAC / Bidirectional Prediction), then, resizing your videos to be 544 pixels wide will still yield an above-100 benchmark, meaning flawless playback (mostly) without dropped frames.
There is another usage area where you can make good use of the almost non-existing performance degradation caused by CorePlayer’s reisizing the non-320/640-pixels-wide content to the screen. For example, take the example of the QVGA Nokia N95, which has an analogue TV output. A 320 pixels wide video is pretty much pixelizated; a 400-pixel-wide isn’t so. The latter is still on the verge of playability without (many) dropped frames (and, if you’re lucky enough, even without having to disable deblocking). Therefore, in cases like this, it’s preferable to create a 400-pixels wide video, which can be played back pretty well on both the built-in QVGA (320 pixels wide) screen and an external TV set. (Also see THIS for more info on this subject.)
1.4.8 High-bitrate tests
Earlier in this article, I’ve already presented some bitrate-related tests to find out what effect the stream bitrate has on the playback speed. I’ve also decided to test some additional situations – extremely large stream bitrates to find out how the players react.
Note that, in these tests, I used the ffmpeg codec (instead of the much more recommended beta CoreAVC port) to benchmark TCPMP’s AVC playback.
Also note that the first two tests show how official trailers like those of Get Smart can be played back. This also shows that high-res, official AVC trailers created for desktop players (read: no CPU optimizations took place: with CABAC, deblocking and Bidirectional Prediction are all enabled), in general, can’t be played back, not even on the, otherwise, fastest x51v.
As the previous chart, Windows Mobile-wise, only contains data on the x51v (as far as CorePlayer, the recommended player is concerned), I’ve repeated the tests on all the other test Windows Mobile Pocket PC’s, including the 400 MHz Samsung & ATI-based HTC Trinity.
1.5 Using Nero Recode
There is an excellent and pretty much up-to-date tutorial on using Nero Recode HERE. This is why I haven’t elaborated on basic subjects like importing a video file or a DVD. Keep in mind, however, that the subjects not discussed in the Doom9 tutorial (forcing the 320/640-wide output with manual resizing; unticking the two (three) checkboxes to dramatically increase performance etc.) are only discussed in my tutorial.
1.6 Verdict
With the hacks / performance improvements I’ve thoroughly explained in section “1.4 Fixing the frame drop problem”, I’m absolutely sure you’ll love AVC, particularly if you don’t mind having to recode your movies and/or you absolutely need the least possible storage usage. AVC, sometimes together with the hacks, is indeed a killer video compression format, even on low-power mobile platforms.
UPDATE (12/24/2007):
TCPMP has turned out to support the same tweaks as CorePlayer. Most importantly, it supports disabling deblocking at runtime – as opposed to what has been stated in the Bible. (Sorry – I won’t re-edit the original Bible.)
Thanks to BrightHand forum member jigwashere, I have been pointed to the AAC and AVC plug-ins for the Palm OS version of TCPMP.
The AAC plug-in is the same as with the Windows Mobile version; that is, it even allows for decoding HE-AAC v2 sound. This is certainly very good news.
The AVC plug-in, unfortunately, only supports the standard Baseline profile (corresponding to the Mobile / Portable AVC profiles of Nero Recode), unlike on Pocket PC, where also the standard Main profile is supported. Nevertheless, it’s, on the T3, blazingly fast playing these “simple” AVC videos - I wouldn't have thought my old Tungsten T3 is SO fast with TCPMP in full screen mode. Remember, even the baseline profile of AVC is WAY better, image quality-wise, than ASP at the same bit speed. (Assuming low bit speeds, of course – not, say, over 1000 kbps.)
Still speaking of the T3, the 204 kbps 640-wide ASP test video benchmarked at 124% in fill full screen and 135% in non-filling (that is, keeping the original aspect ratio and showing everything) mode. These results are definitely better than the 640-wide ASP playback results on QVGA Pocket PC’s, even under the, otherwise, faster and more optimized CorePlayer. Frankly, I wouldn’t have ever thought the 4.5-year-old Tungsten T3 is so nice a device for ASP playback, even with TCPMP – again, even in full screen.
A new version of Nero Recode (3; in Nero 8.2) has been released in the meantime (some 6 days ago); see THIS for more info & changes.
UPDATE (12/29/2007): AAS Top Story (!) frontpage (screenshot)
UPDATE (01/03/2008): let me also present the standard benchmark results of the QVGA, 400 MHz Samsung + ATi-based HTC Trinity / P3600. This chart belongs to Section 1.4.5.4, “QVGA Pocket PC’s and MS Smartphones”.
Also note that I’ve made some CPU usage tests to find out how the power usage on Samsung-based Windows Mobile handsets and PDA’s increase with increasing CPU usage. The results are pretty good: pretty much close to the (excellent) Nokia N95 results shown in Section “1.1.1.1 Battery life considerations” and WAY better than the Intel Xscale PXA-27x figures. These results can be found in my Radio Stream Transcoding Bible, in the “UPDATE (01/03/2008)” section at the bottom.
UPDATE (05/03/2008): For my just-published HP iPAQ 210 in-depth review, I’ve thoroughly tested the H.264 (and ASP) performance of the latest, 1.2.3 CorePlayer version. With Intel Xscale PXA270-based handsets, there is absolutely no difference. On models based on the Marvell Xscale PXA310/320, on the other hand, there is between 30…50% performance increase, making the Xscale PXA310/320 platform definitely better to play back AVC (H.264) than PXA270. You can find more info in Section 1.4 HERE (cross-posted to: PPCT, AximSite, XDA-Devs, BH, HF, MoDaCo.)
UPDATE (01/25/2009):
1. CorePlayer 1.3 has been released for both Windows Mobile and Symbian in the meantime. I've made some very thorough tests on it to find out whether it's faster at playing back H.264 than the 1.2.x series or whether there is H.264-specific decoding acceleration support of the Xscale 3xx series (tested this with the 310-based HP iPAQ 210) or the TI OMAP 2xxx-series (tested this on the Nokia N95 equipped with an OMAP 2420), two chip(set)s announced as ones that might receive hardware support in the future. Unfortunately, there isn't. Nevertheless, if you have a previous version of CorePlayer, you will want to update to the new version – it has much better YouTube support. For example, it supports iterating over all the search / category results and also supports the latest YouTube video formats. Unfortunately, HE-AACv2 and, on Symbian S60, WMV support is still painfully missing – I really-really hope they'll be added before long.
2. I've also played a bit with the latest (1.8.5.0) version of the desktop version of CoreAVC, the desktop decoder for H.264 and directly compared it to the recently-released DivX Player 7.0, which, among other things, has a brand new H.264 decoder. I've also thrown the latest (0.9.8a) version of VideoLan VLC player to see how the two compare to the well-established (but not very efficient, H.264 playback-wise), free, all-in-one video player.
All my tests have been conducted on a 2 GHz IBM ThinkPad t42p with a Pentium-M Dothan running at 2 GHz, 2GB of RAM and an UXGA screen, under the recently-released build 7000 of Windows 7 beta. I've run the tests in full screen mode. (Note that, unlike with, say, the IBM ThinkPad a31p and HP TC1100, video acceleration is fully supported on the t42p. Without it, watching high-resolution videos would be a painful experience.)
I've mostly used (torrented) 720p material like Ratatouille (video encoded at 1280x528 @ 4380 Kbps, bilingual audio left at the default 640kbps AC3) and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, encoded using very similar parameters. Of the former, I especially took care of checking switching between the two soundtracks (English / German); of the latter, I paid special attention to the jerkiness of the animation at the end of the movie, starting at 2:31:05. In addition, I've thrown in some 1024*768*15 fps Canon IXUS SD960 video clips encoded by the latest (version 2009 build .35), highly recommended SUPER (Simplified Universal Player Encoder & Renderer) using 1200 kbps, 15 fps video and LLC-AAC 64 kbps 44 kHz mono audio.
The results are as follows: VLC, as one could easily guess, was by far the slowest to render. It just couldn't produce enjoyable results – the 720p videos stuttered so bad. (The much simpler 1024*768*15fps videos were, of course, played back without problems.)
The free(!) DivX Player was much-much better. It delivered far less stuttering. A quick note: it, by default, doesn't support AC3. Therefore, you'll want to install AC3filter [latest, tested version: 1.51]. Note that, as is explained in section 4.10 HERE, you'll also want to do this if you use other players and find the audio volume low while playing back movies with an AC3 soundtrack; this also applies to CoreAVC and any compliant player like the built-in Windows Media Player or, in newer Windows versions, Windows Media Center. (Note that these do play back AC3 soundtracks – at least under Windows 7 – without installing any codecpack; just pretty quietly) Just install the driver and, under XP, follow the just-linked tutorial; under Vista / Windows 7, go to All Programs / AC3Filter / AC3Filter Config and raise the gain level.
CoreAVC was still (a bit) better than DivX Player. While the difference between CoreAVC and DivX Player was certainly much-much lower than between VLC and DivX Player, I do think it's still worth paying for the standard version of CoreAVC (unfortunately, the Professional version still doesn't support hardware acceleration and it'll unlikely receive any, based on the comments HERE) if you want to minimize CPU utilization.
Note that I've tried very hard to remove (or reduce) stuttering in all players. In CoreAVC, setting "Deblocking" to "Skip always" from the default "Standard" didn't seem to have any effect at all – the video, with very fast panning / action, occassionally stuttered, while the CPU usage, interestingly, remained around 30-40%. In Divx Player, under Tools / Preferences / Video, the "Post-processing mode" drop-down list turned out to be uneditable – it is set to "Custom deblocking". Finally, I didn't really bother with VLC as it was bad enough and in no way recommended for H.264 playback. If you absolutely must use a free H.264 player (and can't shell out $8 for the Standard edition of CoreAVC), go for the (in this regard, much superior) DivX Player 7 instead.
3. I've found the above-mentioned SUPER (Simplified Universal Player Encoder & Renderer) a very-very easy-to-use tool to convert your stuff into H.264. While in my previous H.264 bible I recommended Nero Recode for the task (because of its simplicity), now, I tell you to go for SUPER instead. It has a very simple and logical user interface you'll learn in a minute: no need to use x264 (the famous encoder) from the command line any more, with a lot of cryptic options and commands. You can do the same right from SUPER, without having to read a lot of manuals on the different switches of x264. Also, it's capable of batch processing: you just drop some source files in it and, after setting the output audio/video/container parameters, just start transcoding. It's really easy and the encoder itself is, according to most people, both better and faster than that of Nero – and, yes, it's completely free!
Note that SUPER, being "just" a front-end to some command-line codecs like x264, doesn't support cutting / editing video files before being re-encoded (transcoded). For this task, I recommend SolveigMM Video Splitter the most because it's capable of cutting videos without re-encoding them. This way, it's both very fast and doesn't introduce any kind of quality decrease. Unfortunately, it isn't free (it costs 35 euros); however, it's well worth the price if you need to cut / edit video files often. Note that the 21-day evaluation version is completely usable and has no restrictions. It's perfectly usable unless you have MKV files as source – "traditional" AVI, MP3, WMV, WMA etc. files are all supported. Note that DVD's are also supposed to be supported; however, I've repeatedly received "Can't start trim process (The parameter is incorrect HRESULT: 0x80070057)" messages as of version 2.1.901.22, upon trying to edit / trim VOB files from DVD – without, of course, protection. WMV, AVI etc. files worked without problems.
4. Still speaking of desktop Windows, I’ve also tested the video / audio streaming offers to be able to save streaming or non-streaming content. You might also want to read the following section if you ever wondered how you can save for example streaming WMV videos, MP3 broadcasts and the like.
First, if you’re watching a non-live source (that is, pre-produced videos like those of YouTube), in a Web browser, there is chance it’s sent to you in Flash format. (Most video sites like YouTube use flash.) The easiest way to save these videos is using Opera as your main browser and navigating to \Users\username\AppData\Local\Opera\Opera 10 Preview\profile\cache4\ in Vista/W7 (in XP, change the leading “Users” to “Documents and Settings”) and, before navigating to the page containing the video, just entirely delete the contents of this directory. Then, you’ll easily spot the FLV videos downloaded to the cache upon navigating to the page with an inline videos and, then, starting to play it. Remember to rename the videos to something.FLV. These FLV files can be directly played back by, for example, the free and (unless you want to play back H.264) excellent VideoLan VLC player.
Most of the Flash-based video sources (YouTube, Google Video etc.) allow for quickly finding their FLV videos this way. Note that the above-explained way of finding them also works with Internet Explorer; however, then, you’ll need to make some searches with, say, Total Commander’s built-in file search routine (Alt-F7) unless you’re ready to traverse all the (numerous) subdirectories IE creates. This is why I recommend Opera for this task (too – after all, Opera is an excellent browser worth switching to not only because of this.) I’ve found only one exception – a regional TV broadcaster “ATV” (an example video is HERE), which uses some special, non-caching format I could only save with WMRecorder 12.3+ (but not with previous versions, not even 12.1).
Streaming video formats are another question. WMV, which is, today, the most commonly used (see for example the direct TV stream library HERE) format, saving the stream is way more complicated. With some (few) WMV streams (offering only pre-recorded stuff), you can just create a HTML file pointing to the WMV server / file you can easily get if you examine the page source for the original address and just trying to save the contents with a right click. With real live streams, however, this won’t work – then, you’ll need to use a third-party app. In my tests, WMRecorder has turned out to be the best in this respect when operated in ADA mode. Make sure you give the trial version a try to see whether your particular hardware configuration is supported so that it can run in ADA mode. It works wonderfully on both my HP TC1100 and IBM ThinkPad t42p (2373W6M) under both Windows 7 and Windows XP – and also on my IBM ThinkPad a31p (2653AG9) under XP (haven’t checked it under Windows 7 on my a31p). Note that, under Windows 7 on my t42p, I’m always receiving (with version 12.1; haven’t checked the latest, 12.4 version in this respect) “URL Finder has stopped working” errors; nevertheless, it does catch streaming download initializations issued before the URL finder being killed. And, if you do encounter URL Finder problems, just close and restart WMRecorder.
Now, let’s see what new i-mate devices there are.
First and foremost: much as you may already have read it in my first MWC report, but it’s still worth repeating: i-mate is NOT returning to HTC but keeps on bringing out their own handsets, as opposed to the previous rumors. This is, in my opinion, VERY good news, considering that HTC’s current product lineup is pretty much unimaginative and straight boring (read: no VGA, no multimedia, no gaming).
(i-mate’s booth at MWC)
Now, let’s take a closer look at the four new devices they’ve brought out: the Xscale-based, high-end 8150 and the 6150 (the latter, having a VGA screen, also being high-end) and the Qualcomm-based, high-end 9502 and the lower-spec’ed (QVGA) 8502.
Dale Coffing and the VGA output demo
Windows Mobile (Pocket PC / WindowsCE) longtimers surely remember Dale Coffing and his PocketPCPassion, which, back in 2000...2002, was one of the most lively Pocket PC discussion board. During MWC, he mostly ran a demo of the built-in digital (as opposed to analogue) XGA (1024*768) output capabilities of the i-mate 8150 / 6150, thanks to the GoForce 5500 graphics chip inside. Dale has indeed been really energetic – he kept attracting a lot of people to watch his show.
(in his demo, he presented logging into a Vista laptop via the, in the 6150/8150, built-in Remote Desktop Client [see the Remote Desktop Control Bible for more info on it], displaying the remote desktop on an external screen and controlling it via a Bluetooth (ThinkOutside) keyboard and mouse)
He has emphasized these two models are the first phones with a built-in XGA output. He’s right – for example, HTC (unlike i-mate) didn’t really bother enabling the (analogue, VGA) TV output on the Kaiser (aka AT&T Tilt), even though the Qualcomm chipset does support it (more on the (vast) differences of the analogue VGA and the digital XGA output later). The two other phones with the GoForce 5500 built-in, the O2 XDA Flame and the Toshiba Portégé G900, didn’t have XGA output either. (The Flame only supports VGA-resolution, analogue TV output but not XGA digital. In this respect, it’s way worse than i-mate’s new 6150 and 8150).
Of course, you can still make other models display their contents on an external screen - for example, via Spectec’s new SDV-842 microSD card, which will also be elaborated on in Dale Daniels' article Can a Smartphone Replace a Laptop? in the forthcoming (April 2008) Smartphone & Pocket PC Magazine article (also see THIS for a generic overview of all similar solutions). But that’s an external, additional solution, with all its problems:
the SDV-842 isn’t particularly cheap (albeit still much cheaper than the old and no longer supported iGo Pitch Duo -Presentation Device): at Expansys-USA, it costs some $125
it doesn’t contain built-in memory, which may become a major pain in the back, particularly if you only have a device with 128M ROM.
it can’t be used with the (now, very few and low-end) phones that have their memory card under the battery (for example, the HTC Oxygen / s310).
storage card-based solutions are inherently more fragile than solutions based on built-in sockets
These problems aren’t present with the, so far, only Windows Mobile-based solution, the Dell Axim x50v / x51v, also having these.
And, of course, if you don’t mind it lacking a phone (because, for example, you use a Bluetooth external phone instead), you can still use the Dell Axim x50v / x51v as an excellent, digital XGA output without having to pay for anything else. I’ve elaborated on the Axim VGA output cables HERE.
Now, let’s take a closer look at the four models: the 9502, 8502, 8150 and the 6150. These are all pretty much different. While three of them have VGA screens, the underlying hardware is vastly different, making it very hard to choose the right model. I’ve exported (with a lot of manual work) PDAdb.net’s databases into one chart so that you can avoid having to compare these devices in pairs only at PDAdb.net. Incidentally, I really wish the excellent PDAdb.net folks added the ability to compare more than two devices at the same time.
The chart is HERE - DO check it out!
It’s really hard to select the right device. All of them have some disadvantages, while still boasting some really unique advantages.
Let’s start with the 9502, which is, unless you don’t need the built-in thumb board and/or absolutely need the XGA output and/or the FM radio, the, in my opinion, best of the bunch (apart from the major slider and screen design problems, which I'll elaborate later on): the 9502.
The 9502
First and foremost, let me elaborate on the (compared to all the other models except the non-high-end 8502) unique feature of this phone: the built-in thumbboard and my personal experience.
{
"lightbox_close": "Close",
"lightbox_next": "Next",
"lightbox_previous": "Previous",
"lightbox_error": "The requested content cannot be loaded. Please try again later.",
"lightbox_start_slideshow": "Start slideshow",
"lightbox_stop_slideshow": "Stop slideshow",
"lightbox_full_screen": "Full screen",
"lightbox_thumbnails": "Thumbnails",
"lightbox_download": "Download",
"lightbox_share": "Share",
"lightbox_zoom": "Zoom",
"lightbox_new_window": "New window",
"lightbox_toggle_sidebar": "Toggle sidebar"
}
As you can see in the following comparative screenshot (comparing the 9502 to the HTC Universal / i-mate JasJar), the thumbboard (just like the device itself) is way smaller – I’d say the button pitch is about the half than that of the Universal.
This, unfortunately, means it’s far harder to type on the i-mate. While it’s still impossible to touch-type on the Universal, its thumbboard is, otherwise, excellent and allows for moderately fast text input. Not so with the 9502: with it, the buttons are unpleasantly small.
Compared to the BlackBerry 8800 (which I frequently use for entering e-mails and quick forum posts), I’d say the thumbboard on the 8800 can be used faster and more reliably than on the 9502. (Interestingly, while most BlackBerry fans state it’s the 8800 series that has the worst thumbboard of all BB models, I still find its keyboard speed good).
Another comparative screenshot, now, with the Nokia N95:
As you can see, it’s (only) slightly larger than the Nokia. (Unfortunately, it weighs a LOT more: 200 gramms as opposed to 120).
Let’s go further. The device is based on the 400 MHz Qualcomm MSM7200 chipset. It could be a little bit faster – some of the almost-already (they’re supposed to be released in March) devices like the Toshi G910 and G920 are both clocked at 528 MHz; so is the Sony-Ericsson XPERIA X1; of course, the latter will only be released later), but it’s still OK. I, unfortunately, haven’t had the chance of testing its video / multimedia / gaming / 3D performance so I cannot report on whether it has much better performance than the Kaiser / AT&T Tilt (remember the driver problems with the Kaiser and all the other Qualcomm-based, HTC-manufactured models?). At least, when navigating the OS screens and Internet Explorer Mobile, it was pretty fast – unlike with the Kaiser (without applying the very important, unofficial, IEM speedup CAB available HERE, that is). This also means it has GPS capabilities (not as excellent as with a dedicated SIRFStar III chipset, but still pretty good) and, unlike with the Kaiser, analogue TV output at VGA (640*480) resolution.
Let me a bit elaborate on the latter. Why I’ve emphasized this analogue vs. digital and VGA (640*480) vs. XGA (1024*768) stuff? It’s pretty simple. The two new i-mate devices based on the Qualcomm chipset “only” offer analogue and simple VGA-resolution output, while the two other devices, which are based on the Intel Xscale 270 + Nvidia GoForce 5500 combo, offer digital XGA-resolution output. You can rightfully guess, based on the resolution alone, that plain VGA output is much worse than XGA – unless you plan to play back movies, where VGA resolution is more than sufficient. (Actually, the current Windows Mobile hardware couldn’t even decode higher-resolution video – except for, maybe, the PXA320-based models if and only if they receive third party support from, say, CorePlayer, but 1. there are (and will be) very few of these models 2. it’s still not known what features of the PXA310/320 CorePlayer (will) support(s)).
But the resolution itself is just one side of the coin! The other, even more important difference is whether the output is digital or analogue. If the former (digital), the picture is crystal-clear without any problems. If the latter (analog), then, there will be visible artifacts on the output, which will be particularly visible on high-quality (non-CRT / non-TV-set) displays. Let me present a shot showing this:
(in this setup, the 9502 – more specifically, the TV output signal of its Qualcomm MSM7200 – was the source)
Pay special attention to the letters e, a and s. They are pretty hard to make out, aren’t they? Yes, the vertical resolution is pretty bad. Also, make sure you check out the boundaries of the uppermost, red banner. The red color heavily "blends" in the white background at the rightmost edge; as does the white background at the leftmost one. (The same effect is pretty much visible with the blue-backgrounded banner and inside the red banner with the white-red letter boundaries.) Not because the resolution is just VGA – the same text looks crystal clear on the built-in VGA screen of the 9502 but because of the analogue TV signal’s “blending” and washing consecutive rows / columns together. Now, compare this for example the XGA rendering quality of a digital video output – for example, with the shot above showing Dale Coffing - or the one below, showing the Programs in XGA resolution, via a digital output. WAY different, isn't it?
(note that, in this case, I've used a 1600*1200 image with JPEG quality=90 so that you can see there indeed isn't color blending with the digital output)
This inherent problem with the analog TV output isn’t a problem when playing back multimedia stuff (movies, for example – let me stress again that I haven’t tested playing back videos on external displays to see whether it’s quick enough [old CF/SD-based cards weren’t]), “only” when you plan to make, say, presentations. In the latter cases, you must go for digital VGA output – with as high resolution as possible.
The lack of the digital, XGA-resolution output in the 9502 (and, similarly, the, otherwise, much lower-spec’ed 8502) may be problematic in this respect. In this regard, the 6150 / 8150 are way better.
Major design problems with the 9502
Finally, something MUST be pointed out. In my opinion, the design of the sliding mechanism is VERY bad because it's only a not that large portion of the entire surface that is sliding. This is, among other things, that makes the thumbboard so tiny.
I-mate should have designed a handheld with a sliging mechanism similar to ANY other "sliders" out there. HTC (see most of their sliders: Wizard, TyTN, Kaiser, s710, s730 etc.), Nokia (N95-1 and, particularly on the N95 8GB / N96, where the slider is under the upper plate, as opposed to the N95-1), Sony-Ericsson (XPERIA X1), Toshiba (G900) etc. did manage to implement sliders that don't heavily reduce the dialpad / keyboard size; i-mate should have done the same.
Also, taking the overall size of the device into account (which isn't much smaller than the HTC Universal, which does have a 3,6" screen!), I'm not really satisfied with the screen size either. There are huge margins between the screens and the device edges. With a more clever design, they may even have managed to "stuff in" even a 3"...3.2" screen, which is way more usable on a VGA device, particularly if you're forced to look at small characters - either in true (native) VGA mode or in a program / environment that simply doesn't make it possible to enlarge the characters (for example, the Jbed MIDlet Manager + Opera Mini 4 combo.)
The 8502
Ironically, I find the 8502 much better-designed than the 9502 - except for the lack of VGA, of course. It's, as with all the other two (non-9502) devices, a non-slider device with a BlackBerry-like thumbboard on the front.
(8502)
(the 8502 and the 9502 next to each other)
The lack of the VGA screen, however, means I (an über-geek that does want VGA screens) is a dealbreaker for me. But, probably, not for you (and you may find the 8502 the best) - check out the following section on this question.
VGA vs. QVGA on a 2.8" screen?
While opinions certainly differ on whether VGA is needed in 2.8" screens, I think if you (still) have a 100% eyesight, you'll want to prefer VGA to QVGA. However, you might want to thoroughly read THIS on this subject. Note that probably the best browser today (particularly for people with a slow / non-unlimited connection), Opera Mini 4, will only be readable under the, otherwise, pretty much inferior TAO Intent MIDlet Manager on a VGA device (because you can turn up the character size to any value in there with a hack); with Esmertec Jbed or other MIDlet managers, the characters will be hopelessly small on a 2.8" VGA device, even with the extra large setting. Also, you must be aware of the fact that many games will exhibit slower operation. Not all of them, though - for example, MoreGames Entertainment's great games (Orions, Nanobotz, Enslave) run equally fast on a VGA device than on a QVGA one. Examples are, in general, the not very well written titles from for example Beijing Huike Technology (see reviews any my VGA speed-related comments HERE).
These two devices (the 9502 nd the 8502) also lack the FM radio, which is built-in in both the 6150 and the 8150. Another bad piece of news for (wired) music freaks is their audio output socket size: 2.5 mm, as opposed to the standard 3.5mm jack on the 6150 and the 8150. Finally, both of these devices lack infrared. While many consider infrared a “dead” technology, I certainly disagree. It can come very handy in some situations, particularly when you try to communicate (exchange, for example, contacts) with a lower-end dumbphone not having Bluetooth. Also, the CIR (Consumer Infrared) module in the 6150 and the 8150 can come very handy at remote controlling for example audiovisual devices from far away. I still use my almost five-year-old (and it’s still going strong, except for the loudspeaker’s being burnt down – a typical problem with many iPAQ’s – and a brand new battery) HP iPAQ h2210 as my primary quick note / voice recorder device I always carry with me and countless are the occasions I found its CIR capabilities VERY handy (for example, in the McDonalds, to (secretly) turn up / down the volume of the TV). I’m very sorry for these features not having been included in the Qualcomm-based 8502/9502.
The 6150 / 8150
(6150)
(8150)
(the two next to each other)
Speaking of the 6150 and the 8150, they too have major disadvantages compared to the Qualcomm-based ones (9502 / 8502). First, they don’t have any built-in GPS. Second, they are built on the already-outdated Intel Xscale PXA270 architecture. What is more, it’s only clocked at 520 MHz, as opposed to the maximal 624 MHz; this is definitely very bad news for multimedia and emulation fans. The Qualcomm MSM7200 in the 9502 / 8502 is way more up-to-date, battery-friendly and capable. If I were the i-mate folks, I would have gone straight for the far superior PXA3x0 series. And, of course, neither of them contains a thumbboard. Many won’t see this as a problem, however, as the built-in thumbboard in the 9502 will be too small for most people. Again, unlike the one on the Universal – or even the Kaiser. Finally,
their batteries are slightly smaller than those of the Qualcomm-based models
neither of them support HSUPA, which may be a definite disadvantage if you would upload a lot from your handheld (used it as, say, a HSPA modem). Of course, they do support the downlink HSDPA - that is, if you don't want to upload (much) and/or you don't have access to a HSUPA-capable network, this problem won't be a real one.
their scrollwheels are somewhat less functional than those of the 8502 / 9502.
The 8150 has a numeric keyboard (dialpad) on the front, while the 6150 doesn’t have anything. I would have preferred a slide-out dialpad on the 8150 to keep the size down just like on the Nokia N81/N95/N96 or the HTC Nike 200, but, based on the 6150 (which is pretty much reminiscent of the HP Jornada 52x/54x when it comes to the active percentage of the screen and the controllers on the front of the device), it seems the engineers at Arima (the ODM manufacturing i-mate's devices) just couldn’t make the non-visible electronics smaller; hence the big, unused area on the front.
Speaking of the 8150 vs. 9502 comparison (I consider this the two devices to eventually pick from – if there won’t be better models out there, that is), if you’re a frequent Opera Mobile or Mini user (currently, the two best browsers out there), you might want to go for the 8150 instead of the 9502. The reason for this is very simple: as has already been explained in several of my articles (see for example THIS), if you do learn the dialpad shortcuts of these browsers, they become quicker and easier to operate than Internet Explorer or anything else.
If weight is a concern, then, you need to be aware of the 9502’s weighing 200 grams. It’s considerably lighter than, say, the HTC Universal (the “real” VGA Windows Mobile phone up to now, weighing 285 grams - I don't count in the Toshiba G900 and the O2 XDA Flame in here because they're really-really buggy [click the links for bug reports and what people think of these models]) but is still one of the (if not THE) heaviest model of the current (!) crop of PDA phones – even the VGA ones. In this regard, the 8150 is way better: it only weighs 152 grams – that is, almost 50 grams less than the 9502. BTW, in this regard, the non-VGA 8502 is the best, “only” weighing 140 grams.
As can be seen in the following shot of the 9502,
it’s certain i-mate has gone for Aplix (Jblend) instead of Esmertec (Jbed) as far as MIDlets (like Opera Mini, the Gmail MIDlet or tons of sometimes really high-quality (like Simcity Societies) games are concerned) with the 9502. I am not particularly happy of this decision as, in general, I consider Jbed superior to Jblend. Fortunately, this can be easily fixed (if you’d also like to prefer Jbed if you’re a, say, heavy Opera Mini user or gamer) by just installing Jbed on the device. See the MIDlet Bible and my Opera Mini 4 tutorials HERE and HERE for more info. It's worth pointng out that the Xscale-based 6150 and 8150 are, on the other hand, Esmertec-based, as can also be seen in the following shot (notice the blue "e" "Java" icon.)
This is in favor of the 8150 (6150), unless you don't refuse to install Jbed on your device (or you don't plan to use Opera Mini at all - it'd be a bad decision because Opera Mini rocks, particularly if you master the dialpad shortcuts!).
Camera-wise, none of the new models excel. None of them has any decent lens (the heart of a decent camera - (mostly) NOT the amount of Mpixels the cameras have) or a Xenon flash. That is, don't expect anything comparable to the Nokia N95(-1) or, even better, the N82. I REALLY think Windows Mobile manufacturers should pay more attention to including quality (back) cameras in their models. Nokia's N95-1 is almost a year old and still, none of the new WinMo models can approach its image quality, let alone the mechanical lens protection. This is certainly an area where i-mate (too) should pay more attention to. Along with the other areas Nokia's entertainment-specific phones have always been strong at; for example, stereo, loud and quality speakers with built-in stereo widening (see my dedicated article HERE). Not "plain" SRS but something like the one in the N95 - at least when it comes to stereo widening of the built-in stereo speakers.
Finally, let me quickly elaborate on the question of the 3D hardware acceleration. It’s (still) not known whether the Qualcomm-based models (8502 / 9502) support it or not. The Xscale-based ones (6150 / 8150) (almost) surely do. This support, however, means the latter devices are only compatible with very few games / emulators out there (currently, only with Call of Duty 2 and GeoRallyEX). That is, most programs (again, mostly games and emulators) written for the earlier and much more widely supported Intel 2700G 2D / 3D accelerator (used in the Dell Axim x50v / x51v) will NOT make use the GoForce 5500 accelerator in the 6150 or 8150 – they are simply incompatible. See the current GoForce 5500 compatibility list HERE – as you can see, very few current titles support the chip. (Note that Kokak, the author of DoomGLES / HereticGLES, does promise support for the 5500 in his future DoomGLES / HereticGLES versions.) Also note that, while the Qualcomm is supported (to some degree) by the industry-leader video player CorePlayer, the GoForce 5500 isn’t and, as it seems, won’t be, at least not in the near future. (See THIS for more info on this question.) This mean you probably won't get flawless VGA playback on originally high-resolution videos, unlike with, say, the above-mentioned Axims.
Verdict
I need to admit: I have mixed feelings about i-mate’s new devices. I’m not sure whether I would at all exchange my more than two years old HTC Universal for a 9502 or an 8150 because the Universal is in no way THAT outdated (particularly if you take its EXCELLENT thumbboard into account - if you're a frequent texter and/or e-mail writer, you will just not want to get rid of the Universal, unless you use an external Bluetooth keyboard like that of iGo) and the new i-mate lineup isn't that revolutionary or considerably better than the old Universal. I think I’ll just wait for the newer and, without doubt, more exciting and, even more importantly, in most respects, more capable devices (most importantly, the E-Ten V900, the Gigabyte GSmart MS808 and the Sony-Ericsson XPERIA X1) to arrive. Also, I would keep an eye on the new Samsung SGH-i780, which isn’t a bad device unless you plan to play games (see THIS for more info on the gaming-friendliness of its touchpad) and/or need a VGA screen.
That is, I can't say I'm entirely satisfied with any of these new i-mate devices. This is why I wouldn't switch to either the 8150 or the 9502 from my current setup (Universal for heavy WinMo & touchscreen & VGA & heavy Web browsing / text entering tasks; N95 for everything multimedia, GPS and camera; HTC s310/Oxygen MS Smartphone for pure phoning (and nothing else) and the BlackBerry 8800 for IM / push mail / casual Web browsing). (BTW, just a quick note. Some of you have asked me how come a Windows Mobile fan, MS MVP etc. like me uses BB for push mail / IM. The answer is simple: I must have a BB subscription because I need to be up-to-date with Blackberry-related questions too. For example, I've just offered Microsoft a hands-on, week-long course for enterprise clients on why the Microsoft platform is better for enterprise usage than that of the BlackBerry. [I'm an experienced lecturer; I've led several hands-on, 40+-hour, mostly Java programming courses as a contractor for Sun.] This is why I need to use the BB very actively - to keep me updated about BB, the news, new products, new OS versions etc so that I know what the BB is capable of, even third-party app-wise.)
If you NOW shop for a device because you don’t have any WinMo device already or the one you have is heavily outdated and don’t want to go for HTC’s current devices (because of, for example, the generic lack of VGA screens and/or multimedia / gaming-friendliness on all their Qualcomm-based models), i-mate’s devices may be worth checking out. However, make sure you thoroughly compare the feature sets of each phone to see which fits you the best. Again, there is no clear winner: all of i-mate's phones have lacking functionalities and there simply isn’t “best” of them. You’ll have a very hard time choosing from the 9502 and the 8150 if you want to look for the highest-end models. Hope my pretty thorough comparison of the (dis)advantages of both models will help you a lot in deciding which model to go for.
What next in my MWC Report Series?
(Un)fortunately, I still have a lot to write / report about. I'll post a very thorough report on the new HP iPAQ 210, the already-mentioned Samsung SGH-i780 etc. Also, I plan to post some other, smaller tidbits too. Expect my next, huge MWC article later this week.
UPDATE (02/27/2008):
HowardForums forum member nextel1996 has pointed out PDAdb.net is able to compare more than two devices at the same time; their chart is HERE. You may visit it instead of mine because it'll be kept up-to-date, should be there any changes, as opposed to mine, which I won't update now that PDAdb.net offers a dynamically updated chart.
You might want to check out HowardForums forum member maevro's post HERE. Maevro is an authorized reseller and he reports on his experiences with i-mate.
I've expanded (and partially rewritten) the article; for example, I added the "Major design problems with the 9502" and the "VGA vs. QVGA on a 2.8" screen?" sections.
PPCT frontpage
UPDATE (02/27/2008):
HowardForums forum member nextel1996 has pointed out PDAdb.net is able to compare more than two devices at the same time; their chart is HERE. You may visit it instead of mine because it'll be kept up-to-date, should be there any changes, as opposed to mine, which I won't update now that PDAdb.net offers a dynamically updated chart.
You might want to check out HowardForums forum member maevro's post HERE. Maevro is an authorized reseller and he reports on his experiences with i-mate.
I've expanded (and partially rewritten) the article; for example, I added the "Major design problems with the 9502" and the "VGA vs. QVGA on a 2.8" screen?" sections.
PPCT frontpage
Guys, anothe rupdate. As I don't know how many updates I'll stil have, I found it better to link to the original article so that I can avoid slicing up the article again and again into postable chunks:
http://www.pocketpcmag.com/blogs/index.php?blog=3&p=2504&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1
The underlying chipset in a handheld device or phone has probably the biggest impact on major properties of the device like battery life, the (in)ability to use 3G and overall performance, particularly when it comes to graphics. Even users that don’t know much of of the hardware of these devices know that, for example, at least in the Windows Mobile world (as opposed to Symbian devices), TI OMAP almost exclusively means very good battery life but reduced performance and lack of hardware acceleration of, for example, 3D or video decoding. In this installment of my MWC series, I explain and evaluate most of the remaining, announced new chipsets.
In Part I of my CPU/chipset-related MWC series, I’ve elaborated on the brand new and really-really cool MWC announcement of Samsung. I’ve also introduced the latest technology from Imagination Technologies and have also touched on Qualcomm. Let’s start with the latter.
Qualcomm
In the previous article, I’ve promised I would fill you in on their latest chipset, the QST1x0x (QST1000, QST1100 and QST1105). I’ve already linked to the official announcement in a later, generic article. Now, let me elaborate on the new chipsets a bit more thoroughly.
The new chipset, as you can check it online too, has three submodels: the cheapest and non-connected QST1000, which promises some additional niceties compared to the current MSM7200(A) chipset many Windows Mobile devices are currently based on; for example,
”It’s based on the 65 nm process technology for enhanced battery life and bill-of-materials savings” - as opposed to the 90 nm of the previous generation. 65 nm represents the highest-end technology today with all major chipset manufacturers. (Of course, the lower the number, the better). In this regard, all other major manufacturers are already using (or, have just announced switching to) the same technology: remember the just-announced / released Samsung S3C6410/ S3C6430 from the previous chipset report? They’re both 65nm, as opposed to the previous-generation, 90nm S3C6400. And, the case is the same with the semi-new TI OMAP 3 platform, which I’ll elaborate on later.
”Seventh-generation gpsOne engine with support for Standalone-GPS and Assisted-GPS modes, as well as gpsOneXTRA Assistance technology delivering enhanced Standalone-GPS performance.” - This, hopefully, also means that its performance and sensitivity will be on par with (or even better than) the, currently, most powerful SiRFstar III consumer chipset.
”Rich multimedia features, including camera, video playback at up to VGA resolution, and TV-out.” – Let’s start with the latter. Unfortunately, the pure mention of “TV-out” may show it (still) won’t support digital (VGA) output (only a subpar analogue one), let alone outputting at higher resolutions (which, incidentally, wouldn’t be of much use as analogue output is next to unreadable even at VGA, that is, 640*480 resolutions, let alone higher ones). I’ve already shown some real examples of the downsides of this approach in my i-mate article.
Also, as far as the rest of the statement is concerned, the description completely lacks a list of what video decoders are supported in hardware. (There’s another sentence in the press release, “A comprehensive range of popular audio and video codecs”, but it only refers to software en/decoding, which isn’t of much use as they can’t be accelerated.) As has been pointed out in several of my articles (see for example the H.264 Bible), hardware-accelerated video decoding may dramatically increase performance and battery life. (More on this in the next installment of my MWC device report, when I report on the Nokia N96’s built-in hardware support for video decoding supported by both the operating system and the built-in media player (both out-of-the-box), which is pretty much unmatched in the mobile world. For example, on Windows Mobile, the built-in Windows Media Player doesn’t use the video acceleration features at all on devices that do have hardware video acceleration features – for example, the 2700G-equipped Dell Axim x50v / x51v or the GoForce 5500-based models. On these devices, you can call yourself lucky if you do find a player that makes use of these features: on the Axims, there is (TCPMP / CorePlayer), but on the 5500-based models, there isn’t such an app.)
”Support for Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and FM radio.” - Of this, it’s mostly the FM radio that interests me the most. Currently, very few Qualcomm-based WinMo handhelds have an FM radio. Actually, if you recall, I’ve emphasized in my i-mate article that it’s only the Intel Xscale PXA270-based 6150 and 8150 that have an FM radio, not the Qualcomm-based 8502 / 9502. The situation is pretty similar with HTC’s models. Now, with the arrival of an “official” FM radio, it’ll hopefully much easier for WinMo ODM’s/OEM’s to include FM radio in their handsets.
Note the lack of the GSM / 3G support in the QST1000, which isn’t by mistake: it’s meant for, for example, phone-less navigators, multimedia devices (if and only if the QST1000 is indeed has decent video decoding support) and classic (non-phone) PDA’s. It’s the QST1100 that adds wireless WAN connectivity for voice calls and data capabilities.
Finally, the QST1105 also has a hardware-accelerated 2D/3D graphics core capable of performing up to 2.8 million triangles per second for compelling user interfaces and gaming applications. They didn’t really have a demo showing this; the gaming section of their booth,
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didn’t have any 3D demo; not even a reference design (demo) device.
These three chipsets, as with Samsung’s current (S3C6400) and just-announced (S3C6410/ S3C6430) chipsets, are pin-compatible, which mean (comparatively) easy switchability. (No need to redesign the “motherboard” of the handheld when a manufacturer want to up/downgrade to another chipset.) However, it’s not known whether it’s pin compatible with the MSM7200 (I bet it isn’t) – again, unlike with the case of the (previous generation) Samsung S3C6400 -> (new generation) S3C6410/ S3C6430 upgrade.
NVIDIA
If you’re a desktop PC gamer, you must know what NVIDIA is famous for: the 3D accelerated GeForce video card series. You may also have heard of their GoForce 5500 integrated in (very few) Windows Mobile devices.
(their booth)
(some of the mostly feature phones using Nvidia’s products)
They have, so far, had limited success on the Windows Mobile platform as vendors of stand-alone, additional 2D / 3D chips simply because the platform has been deemed a productivity and not an entertainment / gaming one. Their GoForce 5500 (and its predecessor, which completely lacked 3D acceleration) was only included in few and not very successful devices (the pretty much lackluster, buggy and not any more supported O2 XDA Flame and, now, the two new i-mate Intel Xscale-based models, the 6150 and the 8150) and had even less third-party software support than the Intel 2700G (the other, notable 2D / 3D accelerator ever used in Windows Mobile devices). For example, as has also been explained in my i-mate article, it’s (currently) only two games (!) that make use of its 3D capabilities and absolutely no video player programs. Again, unlike with the 2700G, which has considerably better support.
Their newly-announced APX 2500 (see more info & official homepage HERE), however, seems to be really groundbreaking. No, not only because its 3D and hardware video decoding acceleration capabilities, not in the least.
(their APX 2500 reference design decoding a 720p video)
Not that they would be bad – just not supported by third-party developers, and not NVIDIA themselves, who refuse to open the API to some of the devs like the CorePlayer folks.
They also demoed Quake on with the new chipset, which ran really good. None of the other 3D accelerator folks did the same (they should have done – it’s much more interesting than just some demos). In this respect, Samsung, who, otherwise, has the best-specced chipset announcement, only demoed the 3D capabilities of the S3C6410 with a simple, almost texture-less 3D GPS simulation (which can clearly be seen in the following shot I’ve taken of their tech demo:
; this demo is also visible in the picture you may have already seen). Samsung really should demo their stuff with 3D accelerated games like demos, not just plain GPS navigaton simulation, which, frankly, doesn’t look much better than, say, the 13+-year-old 3D Super FX chipset in the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. At least Imagination Technologies (see PowerVR) used tech demos run on in-production, current (Nokia) models to show the difference between software and hardware acceleration, which was indeed very instructive. In my opinion, NVIDIA’s going for demoing Quake running on their processor in their high-resolution demo device was a nice move. Pretty well, I should add – the animation wasn’t at all jerky.
They have also demoed 720p video playback on both the same device and an external, HD TV:
I couldn’t help noticing the picture being sometimes jerky; however, it was still WAY better than any solely software-based decoding and the occasional stutters in the video weren’t annoying at all.
I can only hope the NVIDIA folks come up with a much more open approach to opening their API and/or making it 100% compatible with, say existing Intel 2700g code (a lot of games, emulators and TCPMP / CorePlayer) so that third-party apps can make use of these features.
Here’re two shots of their reference design device:
Sorry for their being so blurry (hence the lack of a high-res version); check out Engadget’s related article for more shots of it if this is a problem.
Of course, it’s just reference design; real-world devices will be much leaner / prettier; therefore, you won’t really be interested in just a reference design. More in real-world devices if and when they do get released.
3D and hardware video decoding acceleration aside, they seem to enter the mobile business too: their new chipset does much more than “plain” multimedia / gaming acceleration. It contains full support for communications. Again, check out the official specs for more info - its’ certainly worth it. I can only hope their entering the mobile scene as a real mobile chipset manufacturer makes for example Qualcomm spend more time on bringing out better and better products and helping their customers (like HTC) to easily (!) develop drivers that use all of their features. They have even created a VERY nice, 3D phone interface, which is much prettier than that of iPhone. (YouTube demo links below.)
Finally, you may want to check out THIS cellphonenews link collection linking to some other NVIDIA-related articles. Of course, there’re several other resources worth checking out; for example, you will DEFINITELY want to see THIS and THIS YouTube videos on their ‘iPhone buster’ user interface. THIS PPCT thread may be also of interest, particularly my comments in there.
Texas Instruments
Texas Instruments, of course, concentrated on showcasing their new OMAP 3 platform. What’s so special about it? you may ask.
Well, if you’ve ever seen a, say, Nokia N93(i), Nokia N95, Nokia N95 8GB or Nokia N82 running a 3D game, you already know the answer. TI’s CPU’s aren’t as bad as most Windows Mobile users (even geeks!) think. Not in the least. It’s just that HTC is still using the oldest CPU generations (for example, the 130 nm and, therefore, indeed pretty old TI OMAP 850) in their handhelds (other WinMo manufacturers have, in some of their models, have already switched to the 2420 – see the Motorola MOTO Q9h, the Samsung SGH-i617 BlackJack II / Jack, and the Samsung SGH-i616). The second-generation (OMAP 2; all these CPU’s start with ‘2’ as in the 2420 chipset used in most of the N-series Nokia models released in 2007) TI OMAP CPU’s are really-really capable. Their new, OMAP 3 platform and its (then) flagship chipset, the OMAP3430, which was announced just a year ago, is really worth paying attention to. It has specs that are way better than even Qualcomm’s just-announced QST1105. (Note that there’s also a OMAP3440, but I did’t really notice any difference between it and the OMAP3430, so, I don't know in what it's better).
The OMAP3430 is promised to deliver 720p high-definition video playback for mobile phones, while the QST1000 / QST1100 most surely can’t go over VGA resolution. I bet the latter doesn’t support H.264 hardware decoding either. The OMAP3 platform also supports both analog (TV) and digital video output; the latter up to XGA resolution. In contrast to the analog & VGA resolution-only QST1x0x. And the list continues: for example, upon browsing the product data sheet, I realized the OMAP 2/3 series (but, of course, not the OMAP 850 deployed in many Windows Mobile models) are also able to interface with TI’s own digital TV receiver, the Hollywood Solution DTV1000/1001, which is either DVB-H (most of the world) / ISDB-T (Japan) compatible. No such feature is known about the new Qualcomm chipset. (I'll elaborate on digital TV issues & questions in my next article.)
The flagship model, the OMAP3430, is rumored to go into production first half of this year. Hope at least Nokia puts it in the then-to-be-announced models (N97? N98?) so that we can see what it’s capable of. Speaking of Nokia, interestingly, the Nokia N96 (and N78), that is, the two, just-announced MWC models are rumored to run either on the Freecell (as has been explained in one of the post-WMC All About Symbian podcasts) or the STMicroelectronics (more precisely, the Nomadik STn8815 rumoured HERE) platform - that is, most probably not on TI OMAP.
On the TI booth, several third-party companies building on their platforms were present; for example, Ingenient Technologies with their Low Power 3D PND. As their homepage (including their related press release) doesn’t contain almost anything on what their solution is really capable of (as was the case with Samsung’s latest-and-greatest, just-announced 6410 chipset), I ended up having to take a photo of their flyer:
Of course, it’s just an example of the several companies developing system-level support & drivers & API’s for TI.
What next?
Yes, I know you've all been waiting for my article on further MWC devices. Most of the article has already been written, I will publish it tomorrow, along with a thorough explanation of digital (terrestrial / handheld) TV.
(their booth)
(The TI booth – forgot to include in the article, sorry)
UPDATE (03/17/2008): yet another quick note: the OMAP3 architecture, along with Ingenient Technologies' solution, demoed at playing back King Kong in 720p:
(note that the big image is 2500 pixels wide so that you can see a lot of details in for example the flyers)
The video playback was really smooth: I haven't noticed any kind of stuttering, as opposed to the Nvidia APX 2500 demo.
I've heard about okl 4 from open labs allows win mo to recognize omap 3 if so can one hack an omap 3 device to run windows mobile???
qjsmartphone said:
I've heard about okl 4 from open labs allows win mo to recognize omap 3 if so can one hack an omap 3 device to run windows mobile???
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You might want to repost your q to the dev & hacking subforum here.