Database Info

[Q] Video format support status?

What is the status of the Tegra 2 video decoding abilities right now?
I have been hearing about issues with high profile H264 video decode in 1080p. Does 720p H264 HP work?
Can someone test with the test cases and report back: http://imouto.my/watching-h264-videos-using-dxva/
Under TEST VIDEO FILES
I read somewhere that it was ROM dependent as well?

I haven't gotten anything to work, video playback was a big reason for me buying this thing (I've since found other great uses for it though). I'd like to figure this out, I have a ton of 1080p h246 videos in mkv I'd convert if I just knew what to convert them to. I'd also run those test files for you but I can't download it b/c I'm not paying for a membership to some download site to get the files.

h264 high profile does not work on the Tegra 2, but h264 main profile works. The high profile issue is a hardware limitation in the Tegra 2.
You can check your mkv's with a tool like "mediainfo" (http://mediainfo.sourceforge.net/en). It will show you your video details.
As for mkv's themselves, I believe that the device has issues with that container, as opposed to MP4. I can get standard def MKV's to run fairly well in Rockplayer, but haven't delved too far with high def. If you are going to transcode, you're probably better off with an MP4 container.
I'd also suggest that, if you are going to transcode anyway, probably stick with h263 as that will give you the least amount of headaches. I don't know how easy it is to pick the profile in h264 - every app I've tried (so far) encodes in high profile. You might have some luck with something like ffmpeg.

roebeet said:
The high profile issue is a hardware limitation in the Tegra 2.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Really? My ZT-180 can play Blu-ray rips to 720p, but not the 1080p rips. It is a lot less powerful than a tegra2.
As for the the quality of my rips, I used ffmpeg, and don't recall using any "high profile" setting. The 720p rips were around 1.8GB in size. Since I found very little info on how to use ffmpeg, I chronicled my experiences in this thread, so others have something to follow.:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1219959
The last post contains info on how to re-map the audio tracks. The ZT-180 had trouble with the 6-channel sound tracks I encoded into my rips. I don't know what audio the tegra2 can play.

With regards to the ZT180 (Infotmic X210), the DSP offloading methods are adopted from mass produced MP4 products, so I am not surprised if they play well on that device.
So basically the Tegra 2 doesn't even do 720p high profile confirmed?
Is the MKV container issue a software or hardware issue? The Tegra 2 SDK is getting updated continually. Or should I ask this question over at Nvidia's forums

right now viewsonic tablet has problem playing high profile video. i guess rockplayer or vplayer are not yet optimized for tegra2.

vplayer doesn't even work for me. everytime i browse to a file and try to play something, it just throws me right back out to the app.

wasserkapf said:
Really? My ZT-180 can play Blu-ray rips to 720p, but not the 1080p rips. It is a lot less powerful than a tegra2.
As for the the quality of my rips, I used ffmpeg, and don't recall using any "high profile" setting. The 720p rips were around 1.8GB in size. Since I found very little info on how to use ffmpeg, I chronicled my experiences in this thread, so others have something to follow.:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1219959
The last post contains info on how to re-map the audio tracks. The ZT-180 had trouble with the 6-channel sound tracks I encoded into my rips. I don't know what audio the tegra2 can play.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3912/boxee-box-the-inside-story/2
The high profile issue is why Boxee dropped the Tegra 2.

I saw that before, but that only pertained to 1080p and not 720p

roebeet said:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3912/boxee-box-the-inside-story/2
The high profile issue is why Boxee dropped the Tegra 2.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'm thinking that it's a driver problem as nVidia's still claiming 1080p as are all the other Tegra 2 based devices... e.g. LG phone, various tablets, etc.
I did turn up a reference to laggy 1080p video in the nVidia forums, but they seemed to think it was a poorly encoded video as they had one that played fine while a second was laggy. Noone from nVidia commented in that particular thread though...

[Q] Can the Thunderbolt handle 720p HD video smoothly?

Howdy folks, hope some of you might have a few suggestions for a new Android guy.
After much love and consideration for the Android platform, I decided to come over to the Android world. Sold my iPhone 4 and picked myself up a Thunderbolt at the neighborhood Verizon store. So far, I love it. Great device, screen, customization and service. A world of difference from AT&T. However there is one lingering issue.
On my iPhone, I could send 720p direct from iTunes to the phone. It played smooth as silk, nary an issue, perfect.
With the Tbolt's fantastic size of screen, I would think it would be the perfect place for mobile HD video. However, when I take an mp4 onto the Tbolt, it chokes. The playback is varying levels of choppy, and audio often loses sync.
Am I doing something wrong? Is the Tbolt not capable of playing this type of file? I see a lot of talk on the forums about Froyo messing with 720 playback. I'm not sure what to do because aside from that one issue, I love the phone.
Any feedback/advice/info is appreciated. I love Android and so far the community rocks.
Signed,
Former iPhone User

i had the same problem. installed "vplayer advanced" and it was much better - no skipping, no sync issues. i think you just need to find a different player. the hardware should play them fine, but i havent tried a 5 gig 720p HD movie yet. and the default player wont play mkv files, but vplayer did.

You guys do realize the thunderbolt's screen is 800x480, which is a lower resolution than 720 (which you normally think of in terms of 1280x720 resolution). The horizontal scan lines on the thunderbolt (480) is the same as a standard definition television (640x480), so all you're getting is a placebo effect and a huge drain on your phone battery/resources.

yareally said:
You guys do realize the thunderbolt's screen is 800x480, which is a lower resolution than 720 (which you normally think of in terms of 1280x720 resolution). The horizontal scan lines on the thunderbolt (480) is the same as a standard definition television (640x480), so all you're getting is a placebo effect and a huge drain on your phone battery/resources.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Totally understand this. However, for me its more an issue of ease of use. I don't want to convert videos 3 times because I have 3 devices, which was the nice thing about the iPhone/iTunes. One file, done.
Plus, I've downconverted the videos to test, sometimes they skip too, and they never look as good to me. Placebo effect maybe, but again the ease of use thing is the biggest importance to me. If the iPhone 4 can handle this kind of file, why shouldn't my Tbolt?

Problem is probably not the hardware (since the thunderbolt outdoes the iphone in this), it's probably the codecs on the phone not being adept enough to handle them or the developer of your media player not keeping up with certain advancements in android hardware.
Just for instance on a pc, coreAVC will work on really old computers for x264 hd movies (ive gotten it to run smooth on pentium centrinos), however, the built in codecs for something like VLC player (last I checked), couldnt handle a computer that old for rendering HD.
The other issue could be how well they (both the android os developers and the media player developers) take advantage of using the hardware to do all the heavy lifting in the decoding. If it's all being done with software (like VLC does by default on a pc), then that is going to kill the cpu. If it's leveraging the gpu in the phone to take some of the burden off the cpu (similar to what something like coreAVC does now on a pc with nvidia's cuda), then that would help immensely. If in fact android can leverage the gpu to handle things like video decoding, then the final issue is whether or not the developer of your chosen media player is taking advantage of that.
However, if it was some sort of hardware issue, it could be the read speed of the included sd cards http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Digital#Speeds. Try sticking a smaller video file directly in the internal storage of the phone and see if that makes a difference.
I haven't looked too far into the internals of the typical android phone and os yet, but coming from many years of linux and windows development for the web and desktop, those are just my thoughts on the issue.
Android OS 3.0 has an encoder built into it already for h264 avc, so that should take care of issues in the near future for converting your video. Whenever we get gingerbread finally (well 2.3.3 that is), we'll have vp8 decoder as well and that should run things much smoother as google built it themselves for html5 video streaming, so I'd hope it would run efficiently on android. I've read issues with people not being able to handle high res MP4 files on the inspire (the att's thunderbolt) so it doesnt overly surprise me you are as well. I assume they are h264/mp4 files, right? Perhaps try encoding to h263 if so or wmv
http://developer.android.com/guide/appendix/media-formats.html#core

Yeah your gonna have to Download a Video Player app that is Hardware accelerated and plays those kinds of Video Formats. Rockplayer should work too i think.

Been up all night loading my anime + tv shows on the bolt. I agree, i really don't want to be bothered with trans-coding everything i have, plus the bolt does has DLNA capabilities which is another plus if you have a server loaded with the proper media but chances are, those are 720p or better as well.
The best player i used so far is rock player, it beats out meridian, qq player, and vplayer advanced as is the only player that played back everything i threw at it. that said is not pefect, it drops frames when you try to playback 720p mp4 but still smooth for the most part. It lags a bit more with 720p mkv, and lags really bad with 720p avi files. Anything not using the native hardware decoder however, sucks a ton of battery life out the Bolt.
it will playback almost anything at 480p, which is about what the screen native resolution is at. The Bolt does come with a Adreno 205 gpu but i don't think that does anything for video acceleration, maybe is missing the proper hardware decoding chipset which is why is not armed with a HDMI port.
It should only get better with improvement in software/codec but for now, is a let down in terms of video playback.

Try Diceplayer 1.3.0
Thunderbolt's QSD8655 can play H.264 720p.
but HTC's stock media player can't handle MKV, DTS , Flac.
Diceplayer take advantage of hw decoder.
it can play MKV(+DTS+720p).
Don't worry about battery life. diceplayer use almost same power as stock player.

MoboPlayer with ARM V7_NEON coded plays everything fine.
http://www.moboplayer.com/moboplayer_en.html

For reasons stated earlier there does not seem to be any good solution that will handle all common formats used in a PC/Mac/Home theater system on a Tbolt without re-encoding. I posted a video player "shoot out" of sorts over on the "other" forum. In short I was completely let down by all the players I tested. There are a couple here I did not include at that time.
http://forum.androidcentral.com/ver...layers-review-test-comparison-included-3.html
The only one I left on my device was MoboPlayer.
Don't bother with files larger then 4GB either, our SD cards do not support them (or was it the OS...). That being said a good 720p rip with 5 or 6 channels of audio (yes I know there are not enough speakers to hear them all - just so no re-encode required) should generally be smaller than 4 GB.
I am quite keen to hear about any diceplayer vs. MoboPlayer as I did not test diceplayer.

yumms said:
MoboPlayer with ARM V7_NEON coded plays everything fine.
http://www.moboplayer.com/moboplayer_en.html
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Mobo or Rock or vital or QQPlayer can not play MKV(+DTS) HD.
dice is the best. dice use hw video decoder. no sw video decoding.

juami said:
Mobo or Rock or vital or QQPlayer can not play MKV(+DTS) HD.
dice is the best. dice use hw video decoder. no sw video decoding.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I did some quick testing of diceplayer. It is no good. I used the same blend of file types, video formats, audio formats, files sizes and audio and video quality as my tests I posted about with the link to the other forum (prior post in this thread). Diceplayer was very bad. It played 1 out of 4 of the files I tested. Some played but had garbled audio or a very slow frame rate meaning effectively no successful play. I found Moboplayer to be slightly better than Diceplayer.
We really need an equivalent to VLC for Android. VLC as anyone can testify is the "swiss army knife" of players. Plex is the only app better than VLC in that it can output DTS and Dolby via optical (not concerns for a mobile device obviosuly). Who can or wants to re-encode a multi terabyte movie library?

[Q] Smoothness of non-native video - Favor for Xoom owners.

I am seriously buying one after doing my research of all the tablets coming out. Xoom still seems the best.
One of the make or break things for me is the smoothness of video playback.
On my evo, i use qqplayer, rock player, vplayer to watch tv shows/movies I converted with handbrake of my blurays and tv series. I stream these files over my home network. Some are plain divx avi's, some are 720p/1080p mkvs.When i feel like watching it on a trip or something, i just throw files on my phone to watch on the go.
Due to the small size of the screen, the phone plays the files as is just fine with no hiccups.
Can a Xoom owner, please install one of those apps mentioned, and throw both a sd video (divx avi like for a tv show episode) and a 720p and 1080p mkv (like the bd rip movies) and see how she plays them?
Any stuttering? Video/sound stay in sync?
I really do not want to reencode all my files to 'native hardware' accelerated support files. Hopefully the dualcore tegra is enough to run software decode via these players on the higher res screen smoothly.
Thanks

Did you search? There are a ton of 20 page threads already about this.
Honestly it's been done to death!
No, so far the Xoom will not play high profile h.264 files well.

Probably 6 different threads on this already.
Here's one to get you started:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=968640

As the other members said, please search before posting.
Thread closed.

[Q] Smooth 720p/1080p video playback possible?

In particular MKV files.
I have noted that if I playback an 720p MKV with AC3/DTS sound the video plays perfectly fluid. No microjudder or frame drops AFAIK. But there is no sound of course because the inbuilt player does not support AC3/DTS natively.
However add AAC 2.0 audio into the file (MKV or MP4 container it matters not) I see judder. Kinda like when you have 23.976FPS playing on a 50Hz PAL CRT.
I have tried muxing at various framerates and interestingly the judder gets faster the higher the FPS. Very odd.
I'm used to dealing with AV stuff as I use MPC-HC/ReClock/MadVR etc to my HDTV over HDMI (BTW my Panasonic G20 Plasma does not recognise the TF HDMI output. My PC monittor does however so the TF is outputting in an unsupported res/Hz for my HDTV obviously).
It's puzzling me how when the TF does not have to playback audio the video is perfect but as soon as it has to decode audio it throws a wobbly.
The other interesting thing of note is that Youtube vids at 720p and even 1080p (Big Buck Bunny for instance) play just fine. Methinks that Flash is optimized to the Tegra 2 chip whilst the inbuilt TF player (and all the other players) are not. Moboplayer, Vplayer etc are all a bit crap at it. There is one player called LittlePlayer which gives the option of hardware playback but it is no better than the inbuilt player as it does not decode AC3/DTS and it too judders when AAC audio is played.
Anyone got a clue why this is the case? I was wondering if it was a UK specific issue (would not put it past Asus to make it PAL centric) but then why would it play a 23.976FPS 720p x264 in MKV perfectly (sans audio obviously)?

Yeah I have a 720p mkv and it plays a little off with the sound but I play a higher quality move still at 720p and the sound is like a second off. And the 1080p vids I have don't play at all. What app do you use to play your videos?
Sent from my Transformer TF101 using XDA Premium App

you must be doing something wrong with the muxing or the avc stream you ended up with is not extracted properly.
I encode movies with x264 (commandline), encode the audio with neroaacen(lc, cbr, 128kbit) and mux them with mp4box. The file plays perfectly with the built-in player, meridian or rockplayer in hardware decoding mode.
Most mkv TV series I can extract th evideo stream from and use it, but not all. Some use too many reference frames while encoding and the TF can't handle it.
X264 profile high, level 4.1, preset veryfast or medium. No other options except quality level ((crf 20 or 21 I use mostly).

I've tried MKVToolnix for straight muxing. A simple MKV to MP4 prog without reencoding called mkvavi2mp4. Handbrake (Used settings suggested on this forum). I've also tried some test clips from various sites. All of them judder when audio is being decoded. I am not talking about HUGE judder. I am talking about very small judder. The video is not 100% fluid. Some may not even notice it. I do because I am always messing with progs like ReClock and MadVR in order to get perfect 24p playback to an HDTV. I am also susceptible to phosphor lag, any audio sync issues and other annoyances. I am Mr Super Anal when it comes to perfect playback and have color calibrated all my displays with a colorimeter
But I digress.
If I play Big Buck Bunny 1080p in Youtube or in the default browser it plays fluid (well enough not to be annoying). Now if I rip that same Youtube clip down to my hard disk. Copy it to the TF and play it in ANY player (Moboplayer - with or without codecs packs, Rockplayer, Vplayer, Littleplayer or the inbuilt player) it will not play it without stuttering. What the hell is that all about? Flash player is better at video playback on the TF than Honeycombs implementation? Quite.
I wish I could figure out a way to load the MP4 files in Flash through the browser. I tried file://path to MP4 and it did not work.
If anyone knows a way to do that I would be interested. Maybe I should setup a web server on my PC and stream everything in Flash
P.S. If you wish I can provide you with two sample MKV's. One with audio the other without and you can directly compare the two and post your results. I see small juddering on the clip with audio muxed in every time.

The Youtube app is not using Flash. If it was, Youtube wouldn't play on the iPhone or iPad, and it most certainly wouldn't have played on Android devices before Android 2.2. If you want to see true Flash performance so far, load up Hulu and see if you can get a 480p stream to play acceptably. Edit: Since you mention the UK though, I probably shouldn't assume you're in the US. If that's the case, just load up any Flash-based video player besides Youtube. Sometimes it helps to set your user agent to Desktop, too.
The Youtube app is actually using HTML5, with videos encoded in H.264/MPEG-4 AVC and stereo AAC. The maximum bitrates supported are 5 Mbit/s and 152 kbps, respectively. You need to bear in mind too that by playing videos through the browser, the servers will recognize the device you're playing from and compress and optimize the stream accordingly. A full 1080p video at 5 Mbit/s would take forever to buffer on a tablet, so it's highly unlikely that you're getting the full quality over the network stream. Locally-stored videos, however, are free to be downloaded and played in their maximum quality, so it's understandable that you may see some stutter on large files.

deadman3000 said:
I've tried MKVToolnix for straight muxing. A simple MKV to MP4 prog without reencoding called mkvavi2mp4. Handbrake (Used settings suggested on this forum). I've also tried some test clips from various sites. All of them judder when audio is being decoded. I am not talking about HUGE judder. I am talking about very small judder. The video is not 100% fluid. Some may not even notice it. I do because I am always messing with progs like ReClock and MadVR in order to get perfect 24p playback to an HDTV. I am also susceptible to phosphor lag, any audio sync issues and other annoyances. I am Mr Super Anal when it comes to perfect playback and have color calibrated all my displays with a colorimeter
But I digress.
If I play Big Buck Bunny 1080p in Youtube or in the default browser it plays fluid (well enough not to be annoying). Now if I rip that same Youtube clip down to my hard disk. Copy it to the TF and play it in ANY player (Moboplayer - with or without codecs packs, Rockplayer, Vplayer, Littleplayer or the inbuilt player) it will not play it without stuttering. What the hell is that all about? Flash player is better at video playback on the TF than Honeycombs implementation? Quite.
I wish I could figure out a way to load the MP4 files in Flash through the browser. I tried file://path to MP4 and it did not work.
If anyone knows a way to do that I would be interested. Maybe I should setup a web server on my PC and stream everything in Flash
P.S. If you wish I can provide you with two sample MKV's. One with audio the other without and you can directly compare the two and post your results. I see small juddering on the clip with audio muxed in every time.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Shoot them over

http://www.mediafire.com/?gp3bumw7qy9mppm
Check the panning of each. One has AAC audio the other not. Use the default inbuilt video player of the TF (Should offer if you click on the files if you have other players installed). The one without audio plays perfectly smooth on my TF. The one with audio has slight juddering.

deadman3000 said:
If I play Big Buck Bunny 1080p in Youtube or in the default browser it plays fluid (well enough not to be annoying).
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Just to clarify: You are talking about viewing youtube via the default _web_ browser, setting your user agent such that you get the desktop site and using the flash plugin to play the video? Rather then using the mobile youtube web site or using the built in youtube app?
FYI of your two clips the one without audio plays smoothly in the _default_ player and the one with audio chokes with "This video cannot be played" (This is assuming you tack ".mp4" onto the file names to fool the default media player into trying to play it)
Interesting... I just re-encoded the audio _only_ ("-vcodec copy -acodec libmp3lame" in ffmpeg) and that plays smoothly.
Now mp3 audio isn't part of the mp4 container spec so you'll only get away with it in an mkv container (its flexibility is one of the things that makes matroska difficult to parse)
Ah... the video is High profile at 3.8Mbps that pretty much on the limit of what the tegra2 can do at the moment (I'd say it over it actually) so I'd say that the addition of a complex (relative to mp3) audio track is just too much.
I bet if you re-encoded that video to baseline at the same bitrate and copied the audio stream it would play fine, its just at the max computation threshold.

sub'd... I want to see what you guys are doing, I'd really like to play at least 720p peacefully.

I've tried reencoding using Handbrake and get similar results. Jerky playback with audio. Smooth without. It's like small juddering every quarter second or so. Ignore the web playback that's already been explained that it's HTML5 and is not sending me the full 1080p stream anyhow.
In fact. If someone can send me a 720p video clip with audio that they say plays 100% smooth on their TF I could see if it's not 100% smooth here. If not (as I suspect it won't be) then it's either my TF has issues. Your eyesight is not picking it up or I am going nuts

deadman3000 said:
I've tried reencoding using Handbrake and get similar results. Jerky playback with audio. Smooth without. It's like small juddering every quarter second or so. Ignore the web playback that's already been explained that it's HTML5 and is not sending me the full 1080p stream anyhow.
In fact. If someone can send me a 720p video clip with audio that they say plays 100% smooth on their TF I could see if it's not 100% smooth here. If not (as I suspect it won't be) then it's either my TF has issues. Your eyesight is not picking it up or I am going nuts
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
try this: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1060825
I am using the same profile settings in handbrake (high profile) and ALL my videos are really smooth! and YES...I did have judder/stutter before. download the sample files and you can test it on your TF.
the ONLY downside is that handbrake takes a while to encode but its worth it!
hope this helps.

..........

While I agree that, officially, Honeycomb doesn't support the mkv container. It must be able to parse it as it does support WebM and that uses the matroska container.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6553908/with_audio_mp3.mkv
This is the same video stream but with the audio re-encoded to mp3, plays nicely for me in the default video player it I tack ".mp4" on the end to fool the player into trying to play it.
I don't stream but everything e.mote said about hinting is spot on, also you may want to look at interleaving (a feature of the muxing that MP4Box can do) is you want to stream.

earlyberd said:
A full 1080p video at 5 Mbit/s would take forever to buffer on a tablet, so it's highly unlikely that you're getting the full quality over the network stream.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Way too generalized. I have a Playbook and it plays 1080p Youtube in the browser flawlessly.

I played The Cape clip from the example Handbrake settings thread. The clip plays with micro judder like every other clip with sound. I am now using a Prime 1.4 rooted not the stock firmware and it still does it. It is like frame drop every half or quarter second. If you have ever seen NTSC 23.976FPS played back on a PAL 50Hz CRT TV you will know what it looks like. It is very obvious on pans.
Surely I cannot be the ONLY person who can see this??? Are your eyes really that bad?
EDIT: Tried the MP3 version you provided. Still there. You can count the judder. Tick tick tick tick... every quarter second.
EDIT2: I guess the only way to demonstrate this to you guys is by way of a video of it along with some audio prompting from me to point it out to you (excuse the d(t)icks). You will notice that the audio drops out for some reason during playback but when it does the video plays buttery smooth. No idea why the audio drops out. I was playing back the MP3 muxed version from the link above using Moboplayer but this problem - the juddering - occurs with any player I have tried. The juddering happens on every single video I have tested it on when it is decoding audio.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXfdQP8BtEA
I will restate however. Yotube playback looks much smoother than playing a file from the inbuilt flash memory or SD cards.

I am having the same problem as you and I see the judder on these clips as well. I posted my issues in the encoding guide thread:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1060825&page=9
It has nothing to do with the overall bitrate rate as many of my samples are <2,000 kbps, and just like you, if I remove the AAC audio, video is silky smooth. I assume it's just a software issue that should be able to be resolved, but I guess we'll see...

e.mote said:
BTW, if you recoded the clip, then I suggest using better settings. The settings used are excessive. When facing a device with marginal playback, there is less tolerance for bad encodes. If you're anal about playback, then you should be equally anal about your encode settings.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks for that. But since your video judders just like every other clip that means diddly squat. I don't see why I should have to reencode every video I have in order for it to playback on the TF either. It should be able to handle 720p at least. It does play it but only plays it smoothly with no audio playback whatsoever.

bartleyg82 said:
I am having the same problem as you and I see the judder on these clips as well. I posted my issues in the encoding guide thread:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1060825&page=9
It has nothing to do with the overall bitrate rate as many of my samples are <2,000 kbps, and just like you, if I remove the AAC audio, video is silky smooth. I assume it's just a software issue that should be able to be resolved, but I guess we'll see...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Phew! Thanks for chimeing in! I am glad it's not just me. Do you live in the UK perchance? If not that would rule out any UK specific reasons.

Nope, I'm in the US. My TF is also running Prime 1.4. I've tried the "stock" kernel and the OC kernel and the problem is the same with both. I didn't think to test video before rooting and installing Prime, so I can't vouch for whether or not it happens on completely stock HC 3.1

deadman3000 said:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXfdQP8BtEA
.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
How... what...
Are you serious? I see literally no issue. Either my eyes or your camera, one of the two can't pick up this judder. And I did notice the compression in the better encode offered here (text, grappling hooks, lasers, pretty much anything like that. Not a bad result, but clearly visible)
Sent from my GT-P1000 using Tapatalk

TF Barely plays 480p video! (32GB, Prime ROM)

I'm having trouble figuring out what's going on here. My Asus Transformer (Prime Rom, dual-core 1ghz Tegra with 1gb RAM, ~20gb free SSD space) Is having problems playing video. It stuters the sound (rarely), or the sound plays normal 1:1 but the video plays at a speed of 1:2 or worse (1/2 speed) so after a few seconds its unwatchable, not to mention that if I watch 15+ seconds it crashes the app. Also, if there are Subtitles, they keep pace with the audio without issue. on a few rare occasions, (notably 1 set of rips) the video plays fine but the audio is severely compromised where people speaking sounds like somone playing notes on a low-quality synthesizer...
Most videos are encoded as MKV (varying audio codecs, all the way from low-quality 56kb all the way up to FLAC)
I've played off internal storage, MicroSD, Dock+USB (flash and USB HDD), Dock+SDHC, none seem to make a difference.
My guess is that it's a app or rom issue, since my EVO (1ghz single core, 512mb ram, CYM rom) plays full 1080p video without a hiccup (while mirroring it over HDMI!!!).
Can anyone suggest a player that will play 720p without a problem? 1080p would be nice. If this is an Android problem, is there any kind of workaround without down-grading my videos? (I mean 480p already doesnt look great on my TF's screen, 240p would REALLY suck...)

You never mentioned what player you're using, but Tegra 2 doesn't support MKV containers properly, it needs to be fed raw h264 streams for hardware acceleration to kick in. The only player that does this is DicePlayer. It'll demux the mkv file and decode video with hardware and audio with software giving you lagless experience. Your experience with FLAC may vary though.

frosty5689 said:
You never mentioned what player you're using, but Tegra 2 doesn't support MKV containers properly, it needs to be fed raw h264 streams for hardware acceleration to kick in. The only player that does this is DicePlayer. It'll demux the mkv file and decode video with hardware and audio with software giving you lagless experience. Your experience with FLAC may vary though.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I tried the built-in video as well as "Mobo Player" which claimed it had MKV support.
Someone else on another forum suggested Dice, since it's got a free trial I'll be installing it this weekend and seeing how well it works. (While I would have preferred a free solution I'm willing to pay a few dollars to support devs as long as they're not asking like $19.99 or something for a dinky little app)
I'll report back if I can get it working later, thanks for the explanation!

Give Dice Player a try. It's by far the best player now. It claims to us the actual hardware instead of software decoding.

Hmm, do you have streaming problems too? For some reason, my netflix seems to be lagging in video now. It didn't use to (pure-root, no prime) then it did (prime 1.8? 1.6? can't remember but it was 1.x), didn't lag (2.0.1) but is now laggy again (2.0.3 or whatever the latest patch is).

I'm getting mixed results.
Yes, a certain number of videos will play now, but some still wont it still says it's unable to use hardware decoding. However these are 720p and 1080p (480p plays fine now) so I'm wondering if it's an HD issue... (Yes I did install the Tegra Plugin) So it _IS_ an improvement... I'll have to compare the encoding info to see what else is different between the ones that play and the ones that dont...
Overall, I am pleased with Dice and will likely put up the $6 the developer is asking for. it DOES appear to be Hardware decoding and hopefully it will only improve from here (considering my EVO, with half the specs, can decode + Mirror 1080p I assume this is an issue that will be resolved with time and dev work on the app/plugin)
@ asdfuogh:
I've not done any updates. I bought it used with Prime pre-installed, so I cant really compare. I dont have netflix but I'll try some of the longer youtube streams and see if they hiccup (I was having issues earlier with youtube but I was also on cellular so I had limited bandwidth to work with)

Ashton_Durkhun said:
I'm getting mixed results.
Yes, a certain number of videos will play now, but some still wont it still says it's unable to use hardware decoding. However these are 720p and 1080p (480p plays fine now) so I'm wondering if it's an HD issue... (Yes I did install the Tegra Plugin) So it _IS_ an improvement... I'll have to compare the encoding info to see what else is different between the ones that play and the ones that dont...
Overall, I am pleased with Dice and will likely put up the $6 the developer is asking for. it DOES appear to be Hardware decoding and hopefully it will only improve from here (considering my EVO, with half the specs, can decode + Mirror 1080p I assume this is an issue that will be resolved with time and dev work on the app/plugin)
@ asdfuogh:
I've not done any updates. I bought it used with Prime pre-installed, so I cant really compare. I dont have netflix but I'll try some of the longer youtube streams and see if they hiccup (I was having issues earlier with youtube but I was also on cellular so I had limited bandwidth to work with)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The thing with Dice is, it'll use Hardware acceleration for Main Profile 1080p (I forgot what level) and High Profile 720p with certain reference frames, etc. Exceed it and Tegra 2 can't decode it so it becomes software. I believe the full specification can be found through a search "tegra 2 h264 decoding profile"

After digging through the dumps of the videos I found my problem.
I mislabeled them...
What I labed as "720p" had a resolution of "1920x1080" I had switched to true HD recording about the time I got my BluRay drive (as opposed to my old HD-DVD drive) and for some reason screwed up and labled some BR rips as 720p...
After comparing the dumps and re-labeling, I've found nothing 720p or lower that Dice wont play (and with shocking efficiency! 2-3 hours of 720p playback (mostly over internal speaker) from my USB HDD and I am still at 97% power!!!
I'll still look over the codecs that Tegra can support, maybe I can find a way to get a "low profile" 1080p sometime, but for now since I dont have anything except my PC monitor that can exceed 720p, I'm good ^_^
Thank you all for your help!
EDIT:
Nevermind the 97% bit, I forgot the dock had a seperate battery, the dock was down to 16%... though I think that's still impressive for what I was doing...

MX Video Player is the best.Install the app and the Tegra plug-in.

Ashton_Durkhun said:
I'm getting mixed results.
Yes, a certain number of videos will play now, but some still wont it still says it's unable to use hardware decoding. However these are 720p and 1080p (480p plays fine now) so I'm wondering if it's an HD issue... (Yes I did install the Tegra Plugin) So it _IS_ an improvement... I'll have to compare the encoding info to see what else is different between the ones that play and the ones that dont...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Unfortunately hardware decode of HD H264/AAC files is still broken with HC 3.2.1. It used to work with 3.1, but got broken with 3.2. It doesn't matter which player you use.
I have a ticket open with Asus. They initially said they would fix it in 3.2.1, but didn't. When I then told them this in the ticket I had open, they said "nobody has reported a problem". This is in the very same ticket where I reported the break 2 months ago! I got quite cross at this point as it clearly hasn't been passed up the chain.
Anyway, they have promised to look into it. I've supplied them with a file that plays back with hardware decode in 3.1, but doesn't in 3.2.X. Let's hope they sort it out soon.

Killer Bee said:
MX Video Player is the best.Install the app and the Tegra plug-in.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
this 10char

Killer Bee said:
MX Video Player is the best.Install the app and the Tegra plug-in.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I have to agree with this. MX Player is all I use now. It will dim the button bar and notifications, blank the tablet screen when connected to HDMI, and can easily play back all my (previously) problem mkv files with hardware on the video and software on the audio.
And its free, something DICE player cannot claim.

Rockplayer
Try Rockplayer.