[Q] Video format support status? - G Tablet General

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.
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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...

Related

Droid X/Galxy S play DivX/MKV natively... Evo port comming?

Engadget article, last video:
http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/15/exclusive-motorola-droid-x-preview/
It plays DivX videos natively, and with very good quality as well... not sure how it is with android, but should we expect an Evo port of that player sometime soon? I know it was done in winmo world, but since i'm relatively new to android scene, wanted to ask before forking out $10 for yxplayer.
Thanks!
EDIT:
Galaxy S is also "DivX HD Certified Android Smartphone":
Galaxy S (I9000) Product Specifications, Video: HD([email protected]) video playing & recordingCodec: mpeg4, H.264, H.263, H263Sorenson, DivX HD/ XviD, VC-1Format: 3gp (mp4), WMV (asf), AVI (divx), MKV, FLV
another opportunity for a great divx player port to evo?
frifox said:
Engadget article, last video:
http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/15/exclusive-motorola-droid-x-preview/
It plays DivX videos natively, and with very good quality as well... not sure how it is with android, but should we expect an Evo port of that player sometime soon? I know it was done in winmo world, but since i'm relatively new to android scene, wanted to ask before forking out $10 for yxplayer.
Thanks!
EDIT:
Galaxy S is also "DivX HD Certified Android Smartphone":
Galaxy S (I9000) Product Specifications, Video: HD([email protected]) video playing & recordingCodec: mpeg4, H.264, H.263, H263Sorenson, DivX HD/ XviD, VC-1Format: 3gp (mp4), WMV (asf), AVI (divx), MKV, FLV
another opportunity for a great divx player port to evo?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
There was a thread about rock video player floating around but I can't find it anymore. amazing player, handles whatever I throw at it besides the 720 stuff our phones don't have the power to play.
Mod. edit: That's because it is still a beta and the developer didn't consent it's distribution. It was therefore removed as warez according the forum rules.http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=6805512#post6805512http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=6805512#post6805512
yes, i have it, use it every day... but i found yxlpayer to handle h264/MKV's much better, without major stuttering. most releases (i'd say ~80% of all) on the scene right now are high profile h264 in MKV's so i have a need for yxplayer more than rockplayer.
since Droid X and Galaxy S plays DivX and MKVs (galaxy s, at least) natively, i would imagine its performance being MUCH better than yxplayer/rockplayer. that's why i was hoping for an Evo port
mrono said:
There was a thread about rock video player floating around but I can't find it anymore. amazing player, handles whatever I throw at it besides the 720 stuff our phones don't have the power to play.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Our phones can handle 720p h264 base profile just fine with HW acceleration, It's just that rockplayer seems like it's more or less a software implementation.
But yes I would LOVE to see some sweet h264 High Profile HW decoding support, this phone was meant and advertised to be a powerhouse media player and it pains me to see it only crippled by lack of SW support. (Sorry youtube HQ, you're only useful if I wanted to see lolcats, for everything else, I'm sick of having to go through a conversion process) If only AirVideo developers would at least say SOMETHING about a possible android port...
Or you could do what I did and write a transcoder using ffmpeg to get tv and movies streamed. I'm able to get native res x264 to my phone from my own script, even over 3g. Just can't get seeking to work because I don't know a way to move the the atom chunks to the front of the single pass encoding process before it starts encoding. I don't actually think its possible over http which is why I'm thinking about moving it to an app.
But apart from that I have x264 hw from the HTC player and xvid from rockplayer. What is the problem? They work fine. I don't care that its two apps.
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flexgrip said:
Or you could do what I did and write a transcoder using ffmpeg to get tv and movies streamed...
But apart from that I have x264 hw from the HTC player and xvid from rockplayer. What is the problem?
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Click to collapse
i wrote a batch script for myself that re-encodes (not streams) my vids into evo-supported format. just drag&drop all vids and they are properly encoded regardless of the input format. as far as streaming, i use Orb. the problems with both, i don't always want to spend time (if i have any at all) to re-encode, and streaming doesnt produce enjoyable 800x480 quality with real-time encoding (tho orb allows seeking, which is a +, but not enough to compensate for quality loss).
that i know, but hw-accelerated h264 playback is limited only to baseline profiles. many scene releases are either main or high profiles, and in addition to that, inside mkv's which stock player doesnt do.
i have no difficulty going through loops and hoop to get my vids played on Evo, but most of the time i'm simply wasting time/quality while doing it... that being said, DroidX/GalaxyS most likely incorporates hardware accelerated playback (or a dam good software-based decoding algorithm), and seeing how silky smooth it plays 720p DivX/AVI files, I would LOVE to have a player on my Evo with such good decoding performance... thats why asking about an Evo port. DEVS, please respond
... oh and also, let's not even mention SUBs (A.S.S. inside MKV's)... those things are ALWAYS a problem, no matter which player you use
flexgrip said:
Or you could do what I did and write a transcoder using ffmpeg to get tv and movies streamed. I'm able to get native res x264 to my phone from my own script, even over 3g. Just can't get seeking to work because I don't know a way to move the the atom chunks to the front of the single pass encoding process before it starts encoding. I don't actually think its possible over http which is why I'm thinking about moving it to an app.
But apart from that I have x264 hw from the HTC player and xvid from rockplayer. What is the problem? They work fine. I don't care that its two apps.
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Sent via the XDA Tapatalk App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Mind elaborating on the process for this a bit? I know that AirVideo essentially does the same thing on the iDevices but with a pretty complicated script that can raise or lower quality based on bandwidth constraints. Also they use some sort of framserver to serve subtitles embedded into an mkv/ogm container before transcoding it on the fly. I really don't know enough about encoding to get into this (though I'd love to learn more) but I would love to be able to have SOME sort of solution to this.
frifox said:
i wrote a batch script for myself that re-encodes (not streams) my vids into evo-supported format. just drag&drop all vids and they are properly encoded regardless of the input format. as far as streaming, i use Orb. the problems with both, i don't always want to spend time (if i have any at all) to re-encode, and streaming doesnt produce enjoyable 800x480 quality with real-time encoding (tho orb allows seeking, which is a +, but not enough to compensate for quality loss).
that i know, but hw-accelerated h264 playback is limited only to baseline profiles. many scene releases are either main or high profiles, and in addition to that, inside mkv's which stock player doesnt do.
i have no difficulty going through loops and hoop to get my vids played on Evo, but most of the time i'm simply wasting time/quality while doing it... that being said, DroidX/GalaxyS most likely incorporates hardware accelerated playback (or a dam good software-based decoding algorithm), and seeing how silky smooth it plays 720p DivX/AVI files, I would LOVE to have a player on my Evo with such good decoding performance... thats why asking about an Evo port. DEVS, please respond
... oh and also, let's not even mention SUBs (A.S.S. inside MKV's)... those things are ALWAYS a problem, no matter which player you use
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Orb quality is absolute crap on any mobile device I've been on, and that includes WiMo 6.x, The iPod Touch and of course Android. Unfortunately I couldn't use Orb 2.5x because of the lack of subtitle support and their fix "soon" is worse than Blizzard's "soon" on game releases.
My current solution is a batch script to convert the h264 high profiles to ffmpeg mp4s (simply because the conversion takes 4 minutes compared to 9 if I converted it to h264 baseline) and proceeding to manually rip out the A.S.S./SRT files from the mkvs manually and using mVideoPlayer/meridian to softload everything. It's a long process that I simply don't want to do to enjoy some video
did some more research... Samsung Galaxy S (i9000) & Motorola Droid X both have something in common: Cortex-A8 w/ NEON™.
What's that? Simply put, hardware acceleration for "watching any video in any format". Soft codec standards include MPEG-4, H.264, On2 VP6/7/8, Real, AVS, and more. This explains the above mobile's ability to playback 720p high profile h264 in MKVs with no problem at all.
As far as I know, Evo sports QSD8650, a chipset from 2007, which doesn't include Cortex-A8. Conclusion? No hardware accelerated Main/High profile H264, MKV, DivX, etc playback for HTC Evo no matter how hard we try...
Seriously, the MAIN reason I bought Evo is for its 1GHz and 4.3" screen hoping to finally escape the dreaded days of horrible video playback on my Touch Pro. I LOVE Evo, but this... @#[email protected]#$!
anyways, our last hopes lay in the hands of CorePlayer devs, since they're working on android port. their player was the only thing that kept me winmo somewhat bearable for video playback. CorePlayer plays pretty much everything you throw at it since they use their own video decoders, not android's, to play back avi/mkv/mp4/etc...
PS: most of the time, video re-encoding is NOT an option for me... no computer at home besides Evo
I loved core player.
Rock player is simply outstanding. I highly recommend everyone pick it up once it his market. Much better than yxplayer.
720p h264 (high-profile) video, both rockplayer & yxplayer = 0.5 to 3 fps playback. unacceptable.
PS: different sources report differently, but according to some - Droid X runs same chipset as Evo, QSD8650. So AVI/MKV/DivX (not sure bout main/high h264) support Evo port could still be possible... just need some dumps from Droid X and start cooking
EDIT: Droid X runs OMAP3630, which also has Cortex-A8... dam, why does Evo just has to be different? Cortex-A8 = hardware accelerated ALL video playback, and Evo doesn't have it
Not sure if this will help, but.... Galaxy S (i8000) /system dump:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=704817
the goodies:
/system/lib/libs264domxoc.so
/system/lib/libsac3domxoc.so
/system/lib/libsdiv3domxoc.so
/system/lib/libsflacdomxoc.so
/system/lib/libsvc1domxoc.so
/system/lib/libswmv8domxoc.so
/system/lib/libsavidocn.so
/system/lib/libsmkvdocn.so
/system/lib/libsflvdocn.so
/system/lib/libswmfdocn.so
wonder how much of the above is cortex-a8 specific...
droid x native playback
I've seen it mentioned in a few places that the DX will play divx/mkv files natively, but i really havent had much luck with it at all. All of the MKV files i've tried (3 or 4) have failed to play. Since mkv is just a container, does anyone have some specifics about which decoders the dx has?

[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?

video player optimized for honeycomb, or just tegra 2 optimized?

Hello guys at xda
This question may have been here before, and if it has here it is again.
Is there a video player that is optimized for honeycomb, or at least a player that take advantage of the tegra 2 cpu?
Otherwise i like to know if there is an video player that support dlna devices, so i can browse the dlna server directly from the video player app it selfs, sonthere is no need for a second app to do that.
Last thing, and i dont know if tisnis redicilus, but is there a player that support iso files an so on ?
Hope you can help le, and sry for my english !
Regards Fisken
Sent from my Transformer TF101 using XDA Premium App
moboplayer is tegra2 optimized now. though be warned, like all other tegra2 players, HD mkv files have issues playing.
http://moboplayer.com/moboplayer_en.html
so which codec pack should we use, the NEON?
and what do i do with the .apk file?
sorry, i'm a noob
edit: nvm, took me 2 seconds on google...
Vplayer was updated for tegra or honeycomb I forget which, but it works pretty well for most file types on the eee pad.
stuntdouble said:
Vplayer was updated for tegra or honeycomb I forget which, but it works pretty well for most file types on the eee pad.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
+1
Sent from my Transformer TF101 using XDA Premium App
i've tried every notable media player out there, but i still haven't found one that plays my hd .mp4 file [1280x720 3000kbps @ 29fps] smoothly...
dnaL0R said:
i've tried every notable media player out there, but i still haven't found one that plays my hd .mp4 file [1280x720 3000kbps @ 29fps] smoothly...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
As a workaround, if you have firmware update1 installed, it means you have splashtop. Run the file on your pc and stream it via the splashtop app to your tablet. Should be fairly smooth if you have a good wifi connection. Doesnt help if you are nowhere near your pc of course, but good if you want to watch it in bed or something. You can even switch your pc off remotely this way too.
yea, i gave splashtop a try just to see how it works and all, but it's not too useful for me... i'll wait 'til these media players get updated.
I ave tried rock player and mobie player but, they kinda work. Subtitles dont appear while the files plays
my vote goes for moboplayer
i used to use rockplayer, but too many FC's
I love how moboplayer saves where you last left off on multiple videos
Fisken said:
Is there a video player that is optimized for honeycomb, or at least a player that take advantage of the tegra 2 cpu?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Just to be clear about this:
The Tegra2 CPU is a fairly standard dual core ARM v7 core, This is a fine mobile CPU but nothing special and it will _never_ be able to soft-decode HD main profile h.264 video.
However the SOC includes a general purpose GPU that also includes hardware to decode h.264 in an accelerated fashion. This _should_ be able to play 720p main profile and 1080p main with limitations. However the only way to use this acceleration is via the Nvidia OMX plugins that are part of the "StageFright" media system that Honeycomb uses. This system is not exposed to the NDK, and is only available via the MediaPlayer object in java. (It is also limited to baseline profile and under-performing compared to the froyo version for these libs)
The MediaPlayer object is what the default player uses, hence you either use something virtually identical to the default player (With all the limitations it has) or you decode 100% in software (on the CPU not the GPU) and thus can't play HD content due to a lack of horsepower.
Optimising a video player for the Tegra2 CPU will do very little (Like compiling for SSE or 3DNow), perhaps make it a few percent more efficient but nowhere near enough to play HD content.
dnaL0R said:
i've tried every notable media player out there, but i still haven't found one that plays my hd .mp4 file [1280x720 3000kbps @ 29fps] smoothly...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
What profile and level is your video file? (MP4Box will tell you if you don't know)
So, which is better? moboplayer or vplayer?
freeza said:
So, which is better? moboplayer or vplayer?
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Click to collapse
moboplayer is free and much more popular based on download numbers and ratings
SilentMobius said:
Just to be clear about this:
The Tegra2 CPU is a fairly standard dual core ARM v7 core, This is a fine mobile CPU but nothing special and it will _never_ be able to soft-decode HD main profile h.264 video.
However the SOC includes a general purpose GPU that also includes hardware to decode h.264 in an accelerated fashion. This _should_ be able to play 720p main profile and 1080p main with limitations. However the only way to use this acceleration is via the Nvidia OMX plugins that are part of the "StageFright" media system that Honeycomb uses. This system is not exposed to the NDK, and is only available via the MediaPlayer object in java. (It is also limited to baseline profile and under-performing compared to the froyo version for these libs)
The MediaPlayer object is what the default player uses, hence you either use something virtually identical to the default player (With all the limitations it has) or you decode 100% in software (on the CPU not the GPU) and thus can't play HD content due to a lack of horsepower.
Optimising a video player for the Tegra2 CPU will do very little (Like compiling for SSE or 3DNow), perhaps make it a few percent more efficient but nowhere near enough to play HD content.
What profile and level is your video file? (MP4Box will tell you if you don't know)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
So...long story short...the GPU can handle 1080/720, but right now players aren't taking advantage of it because the required code/plugins aren't in the NDK. Right now all the players are forced to use software decoding which uses the weaker cpu.
So release the damn plugins!
I'm tired of stuttering video.
Sorry to revive oldish thread... does anyone know if DTS audio is not supported on the TF? I was trying out some sample mkv in 720p and 1080p to see how they looked/sounded. After the 3.1 update the 720p videos are smooth, but I am not getting any audio on the videos in mobo or rock or stock player. In Rockplayer I opened the video with software support instead of hardware and got audio, but mega choppy playback.
Any ideas?
Unfortunately AC3 audio (used in most rips) is not supported by the TF chipset (and the tegra2 chip in general).
This means either fluid video and no audio in hardware mode, or choppy video and out of sync audio in software mode. Very disappointing actually but afraid there aren't any alternatives out there yet.
You'll have to transcode the audio to AAC but that means an extra step in the process. The original galaxy tab seems to play everything, but well... that's not really an option either.
newtybar said:
So...long story short...the GPU can handle 1080/720, but right now players aren't taking advantage of it because the required code/plugins aren't in the NDK. Right now all the players are forced to use software decoding which uses the weaker cpu.
So release the damn plugins!
I'm tired of stuttering video.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
No, that's not what I'm saying. The "plugins" are exposed using StageFright which is used by the standard MediaPlayer object which moboplayer (et al) can and does use but only for the normally supported codecs/containers. There will never be anything better than that.
Any app that "adds" either a container or a codec to Android will be doing it via pure CPU decode, that will _always_ be that case (for the foreseeable future).
That said, the 3.1 update has improved h.264 playback massively, I can play high profile 720p quite nicely now. But if you want MKV container support _and_ h.264 hardware accelerated decoding you'll have to get Google/ASUS to add the MKV container into StageFright at the platform level, no video player app will fix that. (Or wait until we get the platform source, there is already a Matroska container parser in the AOSP repo that could be ported to Honeycomb, hell Matroska parsing is needed for WebM playback and Honeycomb already does that)
dagrim1 said:
Unfortunately AC3 audio (used in most rips) is not supported by the TF chipset (and the tegra2 chip in general).
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Additionally: AC3 is patent encumbered so it costs money to include even if the chip supports it
Honeycomb optimised video player
I have found MX Vidoe Player the best player to use on my Vega running HC 3.2 Build 9n Update 2. Unlike Mobo Player the screen image can be zoomed to any size to fill the screen, not just stretch the image.
Do not know about HD, but depending on your video file resolution the image quality is great.
Dice
Sent from my TBolt using my f***king thumbs...
dagrim1 said:
Unfortunately AC3 audio (used in most rips) is not supported by the TF chipset (and the tegra2 chip in general).
This means either fluid video and no audio in hardware mode, or choppy video and out of sync audio in software mode. Very disappointing actually but afraid there aren't any alternatives out there yet.
You'll have to transcode the audio to AAC but that means an extra step in the process. The original galaxy tab seems to play everything, but well... that's not really an option either.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
False!!!
Mxplayer suports AC3 and is optimized for honeycomb
Audio
ID : 2
Format : AC-3
Format/Info : Audio Coding 3
Mode extension : CM (complete main)
Codec ID : ac-3
Duration : 30mn 8s
Bit rate mode : Constant
Bit rate : 448 Kbps
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Channel positions : Front: L R
Sampling rate : 48.0 KHz
Bit depth : 16 bits
Compression mode : Lossy
Stream size : 96.6 MiB (23%)
Title : Imported with GPAC 0.4.6-DEV (internal rev. 5)
Encoded date : UTC 2011-01-12 17:33:12
Tagged date : UTC 2011-01-12 17:33:13
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I can play the video smoothly and I have no problems with audio

[Q] HD Movie playback is jumpy

We just got a Asus Transformer, and it's pretty cool ... mostly.
One problem I've seen is that the HD Movie playback is really choppy. I ripped my copy of Planet Earth, and ran one of the M2TS files through FreeMake to create an Apple TV H.264 / AAC MP4 video file.
When playing back on the Transformer Media player, the playback is really poor (unusable, actually). Is the Tegra2 embedded GPU enabled in the player? If "yes", I'm pretty disappointed. (Who makes the Asus player?)
If "no", is there a free player / update that enables the hardware decoding?
Thanks,
¿GotJazz?
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1071722
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1058371
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1072006
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1060825
Enjoy!
Pretty much the video playing is limited to low profile for now.
We're all hoping that Honeycomb 3.1 fixes it, although some people are convinced it's the Tegra 2 processor and cannot be fixed by software.
(Hope they're wrong! )
buri73 said:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1071722
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1058371
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1072006
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1060825
Enjoy!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks! Good reading there.
While searching XDA before I saw your response, I found that some folks were using RockPlayer. However, now it looks like I may want to check out MoboPlayer, too.
Cheers,
¿GotJazz?
I just tried Moboplayer and Rock Player, both with Tegra2 hardware acceleration enabled.
From what I saw, Rock Player handled my HD content better. There were audio drop-outs in Moboplayer, and the playback was a little jerkier.
Rock Player wasn't ideal, though: While it played the content better without the audio dropping, the FPS display was averaging 10->11 FPS, though it was significantly smoother than Moboplayer.
¿GotJazz?
Tegra 2 CAN handle high profile 720p, it CANNOT handle high profile 1080p. However as stated honeycomb or tegra 2 drivers need an update.
¿GotJazz? said:
I just tried Moboplayer and Rock Player, both with Tegra2 hardware acceleration enabled.
From what I saw, Rock Player handled my HD content better. There were audio drop-outs in Moboplayer, and the playback was a little jerkier.
Rock Player wasn't ideal, though: While it played the content better without the audio dropping, the FPS display was averaging 10->11 FPS, though it was significantly smoother than Moboplayer.
¿GotJazz?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
There is no hardware acceleration in either of these apps. There is only software rendering (with the code optimised for the Tegra2 Arm core) or a thin layer over the default movie player. One or the other.
And the official specs for the Tegra2 SOC stated no ability to play HD h.264 high profile. We are currently prevented from playing Main profile as well and that _may_ be fixed but it's very unlikely that it will ever do High profile.
And no app will ever solve that, they just don't have enough access to the hardware.
seshmaru said:
Tegra 2 CAN handle high profile 720p, it CANNOT handle high profile 1080p. However as stated honeycomb or tegra 2 drivers need an update.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I believe I was mistaken when I stated that the Tegra2 SOC can handle 720p High profile (if you got that info from me), my error was due to poor formatting on the document
I read this:
H.264 with sub standards Baseline Profile (B frames) — 1080p/20Mbps, Main Profile (B Frames, CAVLC) — 1080p, Main Profile (B Frames, CABAC, no weighted prediction) — 720p/6Mbps and High Profile (B Frames, CABAC, no weighted prediction)..
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I saw: "720p/6Mbps and High Profile (B Frames, CABAC, no weighted prediction)"
Unfortunatly I've recently seen this correctly formatted, its:
H.264 with sub standards Baseline Profile (B frames) — 1080p/20Mbps,
Main Profile (B Frames, CAVLC) — 1080p,
Main Profile (B Frames, CABAC, no weighted prediction) — 720p/6Mbps and
High Profile (B Frames, CABAC, no weighted prediction).
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
No 720p stated for High profile, doesn't mean it can't do it. But it's never been stated (Other than by me )
SilentMobius said:
There is no hardware acceleration in either of these apps. There is only software rendering (with the code optimised for the Tegra2 Arm core) or a thin layer over the default movie player. One or the other.
And the official specs for the Tegra2 SOC stated _no_ ability to play HD h.264 high profile. We are currently prevented from playing Main profile as well and that _may_ be fixed but it's very unlikely that it will ever do High profile.
And no app will ever solve that, they just don't have enough access to the hardware.
I believe I was mistaken when I stated this (if you got that info from me), my error was due to poor formatting on the document
I read this:
I saw: "720p/6Mbps and High Profile (B Frames, CABAC, no weighted prediction)"
Unfortunatly I've recently seen this correctly formatted, its:
No 720p stated for High profile, doesn't mean it can't do it. But it's never been stated (Other than by me )
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
http://tegradeveloper.nvidia.com/tegra/forum/video-stutter-720p-main-profile
There's other sources as well, it's just honeycomb since we can't even get 1080p to work in main profile.
seshmaru said:
http://tegradeveloper.nvidia.com/tegra/forum/video-stutter-720p-main-profile
There's other sources as well, it's just honeycomb since we can't even get 1080p to work in main profile.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I was talking about High profile, I stand by my previous statement that the SOC can handle 720p Main (and 1080p Main using CAVLC rather than CABAC) even if the current honeycomb binaries don't let us.
What is interesting is that you should be able to switch between CAVLC and CABAC losslessly without re-encoding (Something akin to re-muxing) but there are currently no tools to do this.
SilentMobius said:
There is no hardware acceleration in either of these apps. There is only software rendering (with the code optimised for the Tegra2 Arm core) or a thin layer over the default movie player. One or the other.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Silent Mobius: I'm not disagreeing with you (since I don't have the detailed experience), but before playing the movie, RockPlayer v1.7.2 had a pop-up that asked whether I wanted to use "Hardware Decoding" or "Software Decoding". I saw a big difference in playback between the two options.
Is RockPlayer mis-representing their functionality?
Also, is there any way for me to know if I am using "High Profile" encoding in my MP4 encoded file?
I basically used the default settings in FreeMake for AppleTV format.
I use handbrake to re-encode all my HD movies. I followed the thread below and everything plays perfectly. Yea, it kind of sucks to have to do this but it beats the alternative.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1060825&highlight=handbrake
¿GotJazz? said:
a pop-up that asked whether I wanted to use "Hardware Decoding"
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
"...a thin layer over the default movie player"
¿GotJazz? said:
or "Software Decoding". I saw a big difference in playback between the two options.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
"Software rendering (with the code optimised for the Tegra2 Arm core)"
The default Movie player simply wraps the "MediaPlayer" object any time rockplayer/moboplayer mentions "Hardware acceleration" they are talking about use of this object.
Now it is possible that the default media player does a little extra filtering (for example just flatly refusing to play any main profile video) rather than letting the MediaPlayer object decide, its also possible that overlays and cruft could make one of the two (mainly fortware) players play with varying frame rates when just reusing the MediaPlayer object. I'll knock up a _very_ bare bones media player app tonight to see if will play main profile.
To see what your encoding is coming out of I recommend getting a copy of MP4Box it provides the most useful information

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.

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