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best windows mobile for multimedia playback

hi guys,
I have a question , which is the best windows mobile phone which can play multimedia video files without encoding to smaller resolutions ?
Hope someone have an answer to this ?
I am tired of using htc phones which have a lot of problems with video playback ? Hope some experts can answer my queries ?
Note: I only use windows mobile ,dont say go for iphone, coz I had to convert all the divx shows to mp4.
kind regards
vasa

Tried Core Player?

Psygnosis84 said:
Tried Core Player?
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Ofcourse, have used kaiser,touch pro , diamond, touch hd, t-mobile mda vario 2, all htc devices, and now currently using xperia x1.Even this phone stutters with the recently downloaded the wire tv shows on core player.
regards
vasa

Depends. If you don't want to play back high-res (VGA+) H.264 video, even a low-cost iPaq 210 will do. If you do need high-res H.264, your only choice (today) is the Toshiba TG01.
Also see my H.264 bible and TG01 report.

not such use really......
Let me give you some real world advice from my PDA experiences!
To summarise:
HTC advantage plays every movie I throw at it (WM 6.5 build 21500.5) using the Imageon or standard decoder.....I am very happy to watch movies when on public transport.....
My old Samsung Omnia was the same, played pretty much everything I wanted to, very good widescreen. Most codecs played out of the box with built in apps. Didnt need anything else. TCPMP was great on it anyway! With a propa cooked rom it was even better. I was happy with it, would have got rid of PSP.....I would happily reccomend this device to any Kaiser or Diamond user as it is very very good for media.....
My mates KAiser sucks movie A*s. Just sucks sucks sucks.
My N95 8Gb runs very very well with newest core player but cant keep up with the HTC advantage or Omnia in terms of its power. You have to run the movies at full size (no shrinking/stretching) so you often get movies that are too big for 320 X 240....but it still kicks it and is very watchable - I just watched 800 MB xvid of Affliction day of reconing on it. All the fights were perfectly watchable (even if I did miss a bit lol)
I can specifically remember back in the day with my 400 Mhz XDA2 WM2003 and SPV with its 133 MHZ....
I had to encode every vid I wanted to watch best to do it to WMV for quality per MB.....
It was not so easy to watch movies....
Then I got an MDA compact (magician)- this was the first small PDA (touch) htc produced......
This was a jump for me over other devices and I found that it would run standard desktop class (read downloaded lol) Xvid and Divx movies (700MB to 1GB) but it was a bit slow and painfull......I was not comfortable watching these...
I then got a Universal. This was a step back from my Magician in terms of its processing power.....seemed to struggle to play same movies...
Then I got an Advantage (X7500) and it was okish on stock mobile 5. Put it up to WM 6.5 now and it truly is a marvel to watch movies on.
Basically.........I am watching tropic Thunder right now DVD rip....
XVID 700MB Mpeg 4 CoreASP
640 X 272
Its running so sweetly I cant imagine anyone could complain.....It stutters so slightly maybe once a min or so but once I am watching the movie I dont even notice. ITs more like a frame skip than a stutter...
The sound is phenominal (3.5 jack on this device) and I am using some skull candy ear buds watching it now. I am honestly thinking the quality with this 640 272 movie is comparable to my PSP running a proper "official" UMD.
I dont want another media device....my advantage is kicking it!!!
IF I didnt have it, I think I would be using an Omnia and I would have sold my N95 (but then I loose all my smbian apps !! )

High profile HD videos yet?

Has there been any progress with the tegra2 limitations on high profile HD videos, especially with 3.2 or will this never be fixed?
there are way too many high profile hd videos out there for this to not work on any name brand tablets (except Archos ironically and jailbroken ipad1/2).

For 720p try diceplayer. Works for most MKVs and is the best we'll get probably...

akaria said:
For 720p try diceplayer. Works for most MKVs and is the best we'll get probably...
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is it hardware acceleration for high profile 720p videos?

superflysocal said:
is it hardware acceleration for high profile 720p videos?
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Yes. It is. There's a thread in the app section somewhere where the dev is actively talking to people on xda. It's worth the $4. I play 720P high profile videos often, but it takes either a really good SDcard, or use the internal memory. A slow (aka <10 mbps I think...my 6mbps usd card doesn't play well) card will make it not work. For obvious bandwidth issues.

superflysocal said:
is it hardware acceleration for high profile 720p videos?
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Hi I just installed it and it works!
My high profile 720p mkv files are playing very smooth.
But I cannot understand WHY this the DicePlayer is the only player
that can play such files smoothly. Maybe it uses hardware decoding for video and software decoding for audio?

chaykee said:
Hi I just installed it and it works!
My high profile 720p mkv files are playing very smooth.
But I cannot understand WHY this the DicePlayer is the only player
that can play such files smoothly. Maybe it uses hardware decoding for video and software decoding for audio?
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thats exactly what it does.

darkhawkff said:
Yes. It is. There's a thread in the app section somewhere where the dev is actively talking to people on xda. It's worth the $4. I play 720P high profile videos often, but it takes either a really good SDcard, or use the internal memory. A slow (aka <10 mbps I think...my 6mbps usd card doesn't play well) card will make it not work. For obvious bandwidth issues.
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class 10 is 10 megabytes per second... in order for video content to exceed that bandwidth, it'd be 600 megabytes per minute of video, or 36gb per hour of video. Bandwidth is not an issue.
also keep in mind classes are WRITE speeds, not read, read is almost always faster than write.

I can't get the demo to play without sticking after a few seconds. Tried various 720p MKV's. Running off a class 6 MicroSD.

I tried this and now about 1/2 to 3/4 of my 720p files can be played smoothly.
Wondering though, the ones that do play, have a slight pixelated appearance to them, I was dissapointed in its visual appearance. I don't think its related to this player but the Tf in general? Perhaps bitrate is not high enough and that's why it was able to play?
The thing is if I play this on my archos 70 or ipad1 with XBMC, the picture quality is perfect, HD looking.
Anyone noticing this?

I find that curious as well. Noticed the same thing which wonders me since 720p should be mapped 1:1 on the transformer screen. But you can really notice the difference to a (baseline) encoded 1080p Video!

Can Dice Player play movies from NAS drive? And if you need thread about dice I think it is this one: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=16273817#post16273817

superflysocal said:
I tried this and now about 1/2 to 3/4 of my 720p files can be played smoothly.
Wondering though, the ones that do play, have a slight pixelated appearance to them, I was dissapointed in its visual appearance. I don't think its related to this player but the Tf in general? Perhaps bitrate is not high enough and that's why it was able to play?
The thing is if I play this on my archos 70 or ipad1 with XBMC, the picture quality is perfect, HD looking.
Anyone noticing this?
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I played Rango in a 720P DiVXHD the other day (in MoboPlayer I believe), and I was really impressed with the quality (playing over the network nonetheless)... I'l have to go back and try it again and really pay attention to the visual quality of it. Overall though, I thought it looked great, and noticeably better than any of the 480p videos I play on it.

When I was saying that video playback gets stuck I meant I was using the Diceplayer 3 day trial version. Everything I played that contained a AC3 or DTS track caused the video to freeze after a few seconds of playback. FF a bit and it plays then freezes again.

deadman3000 said:
When I was saying that video playback gets stuck I meant I was using the Diceplayer 3 day trial version. Everything I played that contained a AC3 or DTS track caused the video to freeze after a few seconds of playback. FF a bit and it plays then freezes again.
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Because the player is only using the cpu to decode the ac3 audiostream. Combine this with the load from the video-decoding and there is not enough cpu power. Even at 1500Mhz i have not enough power for all my mkvs.

I tend to forget that when I ran a 2.4Ghz AMD CPU on my desktop the highest res I could play were 720p MKV's most of the time. I am guessing some sorta hardware acceleration needs to be achieved in the codecs for it to play them smoothly?

I recorded a Full HD MP4 video with my Samsung Galaxy S2, where I can play back it absolutely smoothly. Then I copied it to my TF's internal SD card and it stutters like hell with the same player.
I would never have expected this, because both devices should have pretty similar performance hardwarewise.

Aymara said:
I recorded a Full HD MP4 video with my Samsung Galaxy S2, where I can play back it absolutely smoothly. Then I copied it to my TF's internal SD card and it stutters like hell with the same player.
I would never have expected this, because both devices should have pretty similar performance hardwarewise.
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Full HD is not good.
Tegra 2 only supports Baseline for Full HD. You should check the video and which profile it has.

sontin said:
Full HD is not good.
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But it should be. If you search Google for "Tegra 2 Full HD Video" you'll find several hints, that it should work like a charm, like in THIS product presentation video. I wonder, which player they are using in this demo.

Aymara said:
But it should be. If you search Google for "Tegra 2 Full HD Video" you'll find several hints, that it should work like a charm, like in THIS product presentation video. I wonder, which player they are using in this demo.
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Tegra 2 is able to play Full HD but (and this is a big but) only Baseline Profile.
And that's the problem: Baseline is dying which makes Full HD on Tegra 2 a useless feature.

I think it's this device/Honeycomb. I had no issues playing main profile with B-frames (no CABAC/Weighted-P or B-frames) on my Elocity A7 (Froyo). Same files do not play on Transformer.
I could never get CABAC to work, but even 2.35 cropped 1080p files played.
I'm really impressed that Dice can do mkv. It's very computationally intensive as far as containers go. Might have to give it a try.
Something's jacked up and one day it will magicly fix itself.
The main info thread said that 3.2 was supposed to have better media support. What works better?

Maximum Video Encoded level for stutter free playback?

I'm looking to a upgrade from my current handset, an old school Nokia 6120c.
What is most important to me is that the new phone (HTC Desire S) be able to play videos encoded at a "High:L5.1" level within a mkv container, or at least High:L4.1 as most 720p tv shows i got downloaded are at that encoding level.
Thee videos will not be played from local storage (Phone/SD Card) rather they wil be streamed from my NAS which is running TwonkeyServer.
The toss up over what phone to get came down to which had the better chipset, more specifically the better gpu in terms of hardware acceleration to play these 720p videos without a single stutter.
Not wanting to blow too muh dosh, im keeping it to a simple single core cpu, so I found myself stuck in deciding between the "MSM8255 Snapdragon" and the "Humming Bird" chipset.
The 2nd generation snapdragon has a snappier cpu however the humming birds gpu seems much better still.
So, heres hoping some of you guys have already given this a thought.
1. At what most encoding level does the HTC Desire S play videos stutter free?
2. Does Diceplayer offer hardware virtuasisation for mkv files (xvid/x264) on the Desire S?
3. Since Videos are being streamed by TwonkeyServer from my NAS, is their "less effort" for the Desire S to play these videos? As apposed to playing them from local storage?

I don't have an answer for your question but I do have a question for you.
Why do you need to watch 720p video on a screen that is less than 4"?
I have never understood this need for devices with such small screens to playback such high rez video other than that which has been filmed on it.
Surely a standard xvid would look just as good on the small screen.

^ not to mention that both the Desire S nor the Galaxy S have a horizontal video resolution of 480, so watching a 720p video would be scaled down significantly anyway.

stonedandhappy said:
I don't have an answer for your question but I do have a question for you.
Why do you need to watch 720p video on a screen that is less than 4"?
..
Surely a standard xvid would look just as good on the small screen.
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Yeh it sure would, however i dont have the time or effort to be re-encoding videos all the time. I have "Sickbeard" download all the TV shows i have subscribed to my NAS box daily, so i would just like to stream the videos directly to my phone without messing around all the time with encodes and re-sizing videos everyday..

bseos said:
I'm looking to a upgrade from my current handset, an old school Nokia 6120c.
1. At what most encoding level does the HTC Desire S play videos stutter free?
2. Does Diceplayer offer hardware virtuasisation for mkv files (xvid/x264) on the Desire S?
3. Since Videos are being streamed by TwonkeyServer from my NAS, is their "less effort" for the Desire S to play these videos? As apposed to playing them from local storage?
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If you want playing 720p H.264 [email protected],5.1 video, buy Smasung(Hummingbird,Exynos) , Dual core snapdragon.
QSD8255 is not good at playing 720p H.264 [email protected]/5.x video.
1. 3.1 is Shutter free level.
2. YES
3. Subs have some problems. UPNP(DLNA) is not good for subs.
I recommand CIFS export + cifs mount using cifs.ko

juami said:
If you want playing 720p H.264 [email protected],5.1 video, buy Smasung(Hummingbird,Exynos) , Dual core snapdragon.
QSD8255 is not good at playing 720p H.264 [email protected]/5.x video.
1. 3.1 is Shutter free level.
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Isnt that for the 1st generation snapdragon "QSD8250" (The 1st Desire with hard buttons)?
diceplayer.inisoft.co.kr said:
Supported devices
* Samsung Galaxy S2 : 1080p H.264 [email protected]/MPEG-4,1080i AVCHD MTS
* Samsung Galaxy S and variants : 720p H.264 [email protected]
* HTC Nexus-1,Desire and QSD8250 baesd devices : 720p H.264 [email protected]
=> May need libOmxVdec.so patch.
* HTC Sensation,Evo 4G+.Evo 3D : 720p [email protected]/1080p [email protected](some 1080p files have shuttering)
* HTC Desire HD,ThunderBolt : 720p [email protected]/4.0(some Level 4.0 file have shutter problem)
...
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2nd generation snapdragon "MSM8255" with Adreno 205 GPU as opposed to Adreno 200 should be ~4 times quicker. So in theory shouldn't it be able to play videos of higher level encoding?
EDIT: Oh my bad, seems you were right about High:L3.1 being the highest shutter free level
As i turns out The HTC Desire S has the same chipset as the HTC Desire HD, which is actually included in the above supported list of devices. Well im **** outta luck then
Still dont understand how even with the 205 Adreno GPU it failed to play anything higher :S
I really liked the look of the HTC Desire S, and its dimensions closely resembled the iphone4 which i believe is just the perfect size for a phone.

720p mkvs and ICS

so i was hoping that ICS would fix all the mkv issues since on my galaxy nexus every mkv i have plays perfectly.
but sadly that is not the case. MX and BS players are the best and only lag when theres a lot of things going on, like the final battle in thor.
anyway, my mkvs are all that high baseband or whatever, and i haven't bothered redoing them, or trying to convert them because i was hoping that ICS would actually allow them to play.
now that it hasn't, i guess it's finally time to convert them all so i can play them.
so i'm asking for help for a program that will allow me to convert all of these so that they can actually play on the transformer, but without any loss of quality, or any increase in file size. currently they're all around 7GB.

70 views and not a single reply.

This is probably not the exact answer you're looking for but you can read this thread: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1060825
Sent from my Captivate

Use DicePlayer, supports hardware decode
Sent from Galaxy Nexus (GSM)

@curti: not sure if that will do what i want, but i'll give it a shot. i'll try anything at this point.
@nxt: DicePlayer is unable to play high profile 720p mkvs on the transformer without lag. This is true in all versions of honeycomb and in ICS. and ICS makes it even worse. Only players that are even somewhat watchable are MX and BS, and both still lag.

quick smart arse answer- stop whining, recode your goddam videos and accept the fact that the Tegra 2 chip is and always will be underpowered to play mkv's.
question: who the hell wants to play mkv's on a 10inch tab anyway, get a TV.

bob dylan said:
quick smart arse answer- stop whining, recode your goddam videos and accept the fact that the Tegra 2 chip is and always will be underpowered to play mkv's.
question: who the hell wants to play mkv's on a 10inch tab anyway, get a TV.
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if you bothered to even read my original post, i asked how to recode them.
And i want to play mkvs on a 10 inch tab because i can't carry around a tv to school or on an airplane, and my tab has an HDMI out that i can plug it into a TV to play said videos.

also make sure you have the tegra 2 plugin for dice player, works fine for avi and mkv on ICS.

I use xenonmkv to transcode. It leaves the video alone but repacks the video and audio in a mp4 format. More tegra2 friendly.

720p mkv should play natively on ics as of now.I got them playing though I encountered an issue with audio not working with the stock app.

@bob dylan: i have the tegra2 plugin installed. dice lags so bad everything is unwatchable.
@pongo: sounds like an idea. any changes in file size? my mkvs are around 7gb, i don't want them to get any bigger.
@DarkLG: not sure how your able to play them, myself and many others are unable to get them to work properly on any player.

Use handbrake to recode ur vids , soo many options so i betting ull find 1 that works for you
ive been using the high profile option in handbrake and i havnt had a issuse yet..

Ligerblue said:
Use handbrake to recode ur vids , soo many options so i betting ull find 1 that works for you
ive been using the high profile option in handbrake and i havnt had a issuse yet..
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that defeats the purpose of this thread.... even a Galaxy S1 can decode high profile 720p MKV with dice player and stock, there should absolutely be NO reason why a asus transformer on a duo-core can't process 720p mkvs when a single core can.
encoding a video takes too much time and it shouldn't be necessary.

zephiK said:
that defeats the purpose of this thread.... even a Galaxy S1 can decode high profile 720p MKV with dice player and stock, there should absolutely be NO reason why a asus transformer on a duo-core can't process 720p mkvs when a single core can.
encoding a video takes too much time and it shouldn't be necessary.
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actually zephik, my original post was asking how to reencode them to get them to work. so he was right in what he said.
I do agree with you though, there is no reason why the transformer can't do it other than issues in honeycomb and ICS. my galaxy nexus can play even do 1080p videos without any issues, but i'd much rather watch things on a 10" screen instead of a 4.6"

zephiK said:
there should absolutely be NO reason why a asus transformer on a duo-core can't process 720p mkvs when a single core can.
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neok44 said:
I do agree with you though, there is no reason why the transformer can't do it other than issues in honeycomb and ICS. my galaxy nexus can play even do 1080p videos without any issues, but i'd much rather watch things on a 10" screen instead of a 4.6"
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Why the hell you keep comparing Tegra 2 with Nexus's TI OMAP cpu assisted with PowerVR GPU? Despite same Cortex-A9 "base" architecture those are totally different CPU/GPU systems. All you see is that marketing bull**** with "CORES! Ghz!"?!
Tegra 2 is missing SIMD-instructions block needed to succesfully decode high profile/high bitrate h264 video in hardware accelerated mode. And you have nothing to do with it. Point.
And talking about high bitrate - 7GB sized videos looks like 9-10Mbps video stream for regular 1h40m movies. Thats way too high for Tegra2. Its upper limit is somewhere near 5Mbps. And preferable Main Profile encoded.
But if you want - you can continue complaining and comparing your TF with nexus or whatever you want. Thats pointless.
So the bottom line is - reencode.
You can find Handbrake profile on this forum, for example. Or try to find best acceptable settings yourself.

justmara said:
Why the hell you keep comparing Tegra 2 with Nexus's TI OMAP cpu assisted with PowerVR GPU? Despite same Cortex-A9 "base" architecture those are totally different CPU/GPU systems. All you see is that marketing bull**** with "CORES! Ghz!"?!
Tegra 2 is missing SIMD-instructions block needed to succesfully decode high profile/high bitrate h264 video in hardware accelerated mode. And you have nothing to do with it. Point.
And talking about high bitrate - 7GB sized videos looks like 9-10Mbps video stream for regular 1h40m movies. Thats way too high for Tegra2. Its upper limit is somewhere near 5Mbps. And preferable Main Profile encoded.
But if you want - you can continue complaining and comparing your TF with nexus or whatever you want. Thats pointless.
So the bottom line is - reencode.
You can find Handbrake profile on this forum, for example. Or try to find best acceptable settings yourself.
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Click to collapse
i think the reason why people, myself included, assumed that is because the tegra2 was being shown off as being capable of playing HD video, which, it is, but just not all hd video, and not the most common form of it, in the high profile.
i do thank you for giving a technical reason though. i had always been under the impression that the tegra is simply the most powerful out there, when i got my Gnex, that was proven very wrong.
i've been looking into the reencoding, as well as reripping. and thanks to a few good posters i have some good setups. Now just to setup my laptop and hopefully that will be powerful enough so it doesn't take 20 hours to do one movie.

playback 1080i mpeg2 choppy?

I had previously bought and returned tf700 because playback was choppy when playing my mpeg2 1080i video's. This is the format my videos are in and i dont want to re encode. I was also only getting 2 hr's. Battery life while watching my mpeg2's. Does that sound right? Ipickf i was to root and overclock would it make video playback much smoother? If so and im on ebay looking for tf700, do i need to ask anything to know its android compatible?

That doesn't sound right to me at least. Tegra 3 should support MPEG2 just fine (http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=28677759), but I can't say for sure because most of my movies are encoded in H.264. If you have a sample video, I would gladly give it a double check. Btw, just to be thorough, what player did you use? Did you play your videos with hardware acceleration? You will definitely drain your battery faster if you use software decoders to play videos (using the CPU) instead of hardware decoder (offloading the task to GPU).

As far as i know mpeg2 does not support hw acceleration. i use mx player. Basically im looking for a 10 inch display for the cheapest i can find that can handle my 1080i mpeg's, taken from TiVo. I thought tf700 might fit the bill?

leif2 said:
As far as i know mpeg2 does not support hw acceleration. i use mx player. Basically im looking for a 10 inch display for the cheapest i can find that can handle my 1080i mpeg's, taken from TiVo. I thought tf700 might fit the bill?
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If you look at Tegra 3's spec sheet on Nvidia website, it is stated that Tegra 3 fully support MPEG-2 decoding, so I don't think what you say is true. Regardless, why don't you provide a sample video or at least other information regarding your videos like bit rates, formats, profiles, etc...? And btw, MX Player has its own decoder called "H/W+", have you tried it? You should also give Dice Player and BS Player a try if you haven't.
If all else fails, just get a Nexus 10, people have played really high bit-rate videos on the Nexus 10 that far exceed any videos you encounter normally.