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[Q] 10 bit 1080p Video

Has anyone tried 10 bit video yet? How does the shield perform?

It works fine for me. I've played the Video in XBMC, MX Player and VLC. All of them are able to play my highest quality stuff (2GB MKV with a length of about 24 minutes) with SSA subtitles with no lag. However, in XBMC and MX Player there is noticeable corruption in the image and discoloration as well. It is worse the higher the bitrate with it being most unnoticeable with 10bit 720p video. There is a hint of it with 8bit, so much so I'm not sure if it is an optical illusion or not. For whatever reason I did not see this with VLC. I think it is because it was using software codec versus hardware codec. I'm not entirely sure because VLC would crash if I took it Auto for which Codec to use. Also the H/W+ codec in MX Player would crash no matter what video I tried to play (resolution or 8/10bit). Also XBMC would crash if I limited the codec to only Stagefright. The other Hardware Codec and Software Rendering worked just fine.

Dear trowgundam,
did you try the version v1.7.31 of MX Player Pro? It now supports natively the K1 but it isn't so stable...

sev7en said:
Dear trowgundam,
did you try the version v1.7.31 of MX Player Pro? It now supports natively the K1 but it isn't so stable...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Just to clarify that I'm using v1.7.31 of MX Player Pro and the colour corruption\pixelation is still present with HW+ or HW decoder used. SW decoder works fine for most purposes. I see the same problem in XBMC (latest nightly) with Hardware acceleration used.
I did find the performance suffers a little bit with the SW decoder (got a lot of dropped frames on a very high bitrate version of Psycho-Pass I was watching but everything else seemed fine, nowhere near as bad as my old Nexus 10 however which is a massive plus). The tablet gets quite hot and battery life really suffers as I'm guessing only the CPU is being utilized?
It's a damn shame because the HW decoder works fine with 10-bit video apart from this problem but it can get so bad in certain scenes that it's not really usable.

[Q] Laggy when playing video 1080p with VP9 video format

Hi, Recently I've downloaded video 1080p from youtube but when playing it, the video laggy but the audio just playing properly fine...
I thought it because the decoder set to H/W, but when switched to S/W both video & audio become laggy, then try switched to H/W+ it become worse (doesn't support this kind video it says...).
When I see media info of video, it use VP9 format video.
Here is the video: www[dot]youtube[dot]com/watch?v=aE2GCa-_nyU
I've tried on 3 devices; Asus Zenfone 6, Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1, and LG G2, all of it have the same issues...
And tried on PC to check if the video has errors or something, but the video is playing perfectly fine.
Is it something like bugs so the video didn't play properly? Or android can't play video with format VP9 properly?
Because I've tried other video 1080p, it can be played properly.
Oh FYI, I've tried using few other video player, and none of its can play the video as good as MX Player. That's why I've been using MX Player as default video player.
Hope there will be improvement on the next update so the video VP9 1080p can be played properly
MX Player is the best

All 1080p videos are not same.
It may lag at various parameters like higher frame rate, bitrate, color depth,....etc.
For example if you consider a video 1080p @ 30fps inorder to display 1 sec of videos it needs to decode 30 frames. Where as in 1080p @ 60 fps it requires 60 frames to be decoded. So, It will require the double power. Like wise various encoding parameters matters in video playback.
Second, H/W uses your hardware's native decoder . If the codec is natively supported by your device, H/W decoder will be the best option.
In case of S/W decoder, it supports more video formats since it depends on the ffmpeg. But, decoding will be completely done one CPU. So, it needs very high cpu power. That's why it's more laggy.

Night.Lurker said:
Hi, Recently I've downloaded video 1080p from youtube but when playing it, the video laggy but the audio just playing properly fine...
I thought it because the decoder set to H/W, but when switched to S/W both video & audio become laggy, then try switched to H/W+ it become worse (doesn't support this kind video it says...).
When I see media info of video, it use VP9 format video.
Here is the video: www[dot]youtube[dot]com/watch?v=aE2GCa-_nyU
I've tried on 3 devices; Asus Zenfone 6, Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1, and LG G2, all of it have the same issues...
And tried on PC to check if the video has errors or something, but the video is playing perfectly fine.
Is it something like bugs so the video didn't play properly? Or android can't play video with format VP9 properly?
Because I've tried other video 1080p, it can be played properly.
Oh FYI, I've tried using few other video player, and none of its can play the video as good as MX Player. That's why I've been using MX Player as default video player.
Hope there will be improvement on the next update so the video VP9 1080p can be played properly
MX Player is the best
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
VP9 isn't a widely supported format. That's likely why HW and HW+ don't work well with it; most devices don't have VP9 hardware acceleration.
SW rendering of a 1080p video is very demanding. Even on the most powerful devices, since there's no hardware acceleration, expect performance to be sub-par. Currently, devices on the market can only SW render 720p smoothly.
This being said, for SW mode, try Settings > Decoder > use speedup tricks. See if that helps a little bit on SW.
Ultimately, the best option is to reencode the video to something like H264/AVC mp4.

VP9 on KitKat+
I've tried on 3 devices; Asus Zenfone 6, Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1, and LG G2, all of it have the same issues...
And tried on PC to check if the video has errors or something, but the video is playing perfectly fine.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Can you explain more where you're trying to playback the video? VP9 support is built in to Android from KitKat+ and should not have an issue playing back. Additionally, can you try playing back the video on Chrome on Android and see if there are still decode issues?
Thanks.

ktsamy said:
All 1080p videos are not same.
It may lag at various parameters like higher frame rate, bitrate, color depth,....etc.
For example if you consider a video 1080p @ 30fps inorder to display 1 sec of videos it needs to decode 30 frames. Where as in 1080p @ 60 fps it requires 60 frames to be decoded. So, It will require the double power. Like wise various encoding parameters matters in video playback.
Second, H/W uses your hardware's native decoder . If the codec is natively supported by your device, H/W decoder will be the best option.
In case of S/W decoder, it supports more video formats since it depends on the ffmpeg. But, decoding will be completely done one CPU. So, it needs very high cpu power. That's why it's more laggy.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
CDB-Man said:
VP9 isn't a widely supported format. That's likely why HW and HW+ don't work well with it; most devices don't have VP9 hardware acceleration.
SW rendering of a 1080p video is very demanding. Even on the most powerful devices, since there's no hardware acceleration, expect performance to be sub-par. Currently, devices on the market can only SW render 720p smoothly.
This being said, for SW mode, try Settings > Decoder > use speedup tricks. See if that helps a little bit on SW.
Ultimately, the best option is to reencode the video to something like H264/AVC mp4.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I see... So the point is the problem because most devices don't have VP9 hardware accelaration yet, especially for 1080p VP9...
Well... I've tried using SW speed up trick, it didn't much help...
Yeah...maybe the best option is to reencode the video to H264...or download 720p version..., cause the 720p VP9 can be played perfectly fine.
Still... I hope the MX Player developer team has plan to improve playback for 1080p VP9 video
Btw thanks for your answer bro
gurupanguji said:
Can you explain more where you're trying to playback the video? VP9 support is built in to Android from KitKat+ and should not have an issue playing back. Additionally, can you try playing back the video on Chrome on Android and see if there are still decode issues?
Thanks.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
As I said before, I'm trying to play 1080p VP9 video (that I've downloaded from youtube using IDM on computer) on my Asus Zenfone 6, Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1, & LG G2 using MX Player.
But when I playing it, the video is laggy on all devices...
Surely you can streaming it using youtube app & chrome android and it plays well till the end cause the available quality option in those apps is up to 720p (the 1080p quality option is hidden on those apps so I can't select it to test if it plays well or not).

Night.Lurker said:
Still... I hope the MX Player developer team has plan to improve playback for 1080p VP9 video
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That would be something you would have to ask the ffmpeg team to do, since MX uses their codecs. Unless the MX dev has a magic trick up his sleeve, I don't think there's much else MX can do to further improve SW playback performance for a video that exceeds the CPU's capabilities...
Likewise, on a hardware acceleration, it's limited by the hardwaree put in place by the manufacturer... so this aspect would need a new device.

Hi, i bumping this thread because i encountered the issue on some youtube vids too, but it's mostly playing fine, i think that with a few updates it will be good my phone is getting hot fast though.. (oneplus one)
VP9 1440p https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNNfZuIA1GQ : fine
VP9 1080p with a lot of "motion" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGyZY4HNumw a bit laggy

I think I have already answered.
Read the second post. Video encoding parameters matters.
If you can't play in H/W or H/W+ decoder, Don't expect the smooth playback on S/W. It fully depends on CPU. If is laggy then your processor is not powerful enough. Sometime enabling the speed up tricks may reduce the lagging.
One more thing, using CPU will drain your battery faster than H/W. When CPU runs it's maximum speed for long time it will emit more heat which may lead to issues.

ktsamy said:
I think I have already answered.
Read the second post. Video encoding parameters matters.
If you can't play in H/W or H/W+ decoder, Don't expect the smooth playback on S/W. It fully depends on CPU. If is laggy then your processor is not powerful enough. Sometime enabling the speed up tricks may reduce the lagging.
One more thing, using CPU will drain your battery faster than H/W. When CPU runs it's maximum speed for long time it will emit more heat which may lead to issues.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Okay thank you. Then i hope new processors will have vp9 decoding h/w

coc014 said:
Okay thank you. Then i hope new processors will have vp9 decoding h/w
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The chance of that happening, I can't see to be high. The MPEG consortium probably pays a lot to lobby chipset makers to only support MPEG formats, such as H.264 and H.265.

CDB-Man said:
The MPEG consortium probably pays a lot to lobby chipset makers to only support MPEG formats, such as H.264 and H.265.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Lolno, it's just that industry is not interested in VP9. Even if they don't have to pay royalties they still have to develop asics (and h/w engineers are saying that it's not h/w friendly) and include them into the chip. It still costs a lot.
And what is the point of supporting vp9? It's an ugly google toy that they're ready to abandon (say hello to vp10 in 2015).

Ah yes, ASICs. I don't think manufacturers would be very happy at making more dies for new ICs. They already aren't happy with being forced to support Hi10p in H.265.

Forced? I would be happy if they were forced, but, at least Qualcomm, have no plans whatsoever

vivan000 said:
Forced? I would be happy if they were forced, but, at least Qualcomm, have no plans whatsoever
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well, this sucks. Looks like we'll be waiting another generation... Where did you find that support chart?
Edit: We should move this discussion to the 10-bit thread. I'm going to quote you over there. http://forum.xda-developers.com/app...layer-10-bit-video-discussion-t2725241/page12

abput supporting vp9 1080p and undeleting files in mx player p higher andrpid version
first of all:
"Most probably you’re on Android marshmallow 6.0 API. If you’re trying to delete a video that is located on the external storage then its not possible due to some bug in the file system and mx player.
If you’re on the internal storage then MX player has only read only rights on the directory on which you’re currently on."
or just delete on your internal system file manager application.
Second answer about playng videos vp9
becayse you can't play vp9 if you download youtube videos with IDM (internet download manager)
because it is bull**** and its newer versions used idmmkvlib.01 codec.so when downloadimg it not only download andit convert into ist bull**** special format.so won't play withx pr others.try another downloader or manual download yt videos i recomend.

Audio and Video out of sync

I have a number of videos with the following properties. Their video frame rate is 30 at 720p with codec of H.264 part 10, using Lavf57.27.100 to encode. The audio is AAC at 48kHz..
I played these videos on different number of android devices using MX Player with HW decoding. The video is delayed by a second or two. But with HW+. things seem ok.
I played these same videos on the same android devices using BS Player. The video and the audio are perfectly in sync.
How come? Please help.

BS uses a implementation similar to HW+ as default. So, you will get the result like HW+.
In HW decoder, MX Player uses the mediaplayer implementation from android itself. MX Player's control on it is very limited.
If HW+ works fine, you may just use it. From 1.9.0 HW+ will be enabled by default for all users with android 5.0+. But, HW will be the default one as usual.

Freezing image on H264 with HW+ decoder

Hi, I've recently started using MX Player on my Android TV as its HW+ decoder plays very high bitrate 4K HDR H265 very smoothly whereas VLC player stutters. Really liking it so far.
However, I started to notice an issue with the HW+ decoder on H264: a lot of times, somewhere at the start of the video, the image freezes. Meanwhile, audio and subtitle tracks continue. This is easily resolved by just skipping a few seconds forwards or backwards, but it happens so often that it is a bit annoying. So I'm wondering if this is a known issue and if it has a known solution, despite that I can't seem to find anything about it after searching the forums.
I haven't bothered with providing custom codecs as I figure that isn't needed unless MX Player asks you to, but I did notice that MX Player uses the Neon codecs on my Android TV.
Things I've tried so far:
- Use the alternate HW+ decoder. Unfortunately this seems to perform not as good on high bitrate videos, and wide color gamut support seems absent on HDR videos, so I figured this one has more downsides than the original one.
- Disable H264 support on the HW+ decoder, so that it uses the HW decoder by default for H264. This works quite well, but for some reason, HW decoder seems to fail on many of my videos, causing MX player to fall back to SW, which gives noticeably worse performance and picture quality on my Android TV.
If I can't solve the freezing image on the HW+ decoder, I'd be interested to know how to best debug failures of the HW decoder so I can more reliably fall back to HW for H264.

shvklatch said:
- Disable H264 support on the HW+ decoder, so that it uses the HW decoder by default for H264. This works quite well, but for some reason, HW decoder seems to fail on many of my videos, causing MX player to fall back to SW, which gives noticeably worse performance and picture quality on my Android TV.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Probably the issue is either with your videos or system decoders.
H264 is supported on most of the devices. HW decoder is basically a wrapper for Android mediaplayer implemented on your device.
So, Most of the issues on HW decoder is from the device firmware itself.
HW+ decoder also uses the decoders available on the system. From the symptoms, it looks like your system decoder freezes or fails to decode the video frames.
Can you connect your device to a system in debugging mode & collect the logs while reproducing the issue?
It will give better insight into the issue.

Hi! Thank you for your reply. I figured you might be right about any HW decoder issues being caused by the system or the videos themselves, so I tried some stuff out. For instance, forcing VLC player to use hardware acc., the same videos play without issue, over and over again. Puzzled with this, I removed MX player completely from the Android TV device, and then installed it again. To my surprise, this fixed the HW decoder issues. The same H264 videos could now be played effortlessly with the HW decoder. In fact, I don't have any issue with H264 videos on the HW decoder at all anymore. This is great, but unfortunately also means I can no longer produce logs of the HW decoder issue I experienced. Not sure what happened there.
The HW+ decoder issue remains however. I'm still seeing the video track getting stuck on a single frame close at the start of H264 videos, until I skip forward or backward. Audio and subtitle tracks continue as normal. This behavior is completely inconsistent, seemingly random and not always occurring, even on the same video. This happened not even once during all my tests with the HW decoder, nor on any H265 video with the HW+ decoder. I will attempt to collect logs while reproducing and report back here once I succeed. (this could take a while)

shvklatch said:
Hi! Thank you for your reply. I figured you might be right about any HW decoder issues being caused by the system or the videos themselves, so I tried some stuff out. For instance, forcing VLC player to use hardware acc., the same videos play without issue, over and over again. Puzzled with this, I removed MX player completely from the Android TV device, and then installed it again. To my surprise, this fixed the HW decoder issues. The same H264 videos could now be played effortlessly with the HW decoder. In fact, I don't have any issue with H264 videos on the HW decoder at all anymore. This is great, but unfortunately also means I can no longer produce logs of the HW decoder issue I experienced. Not sure what happened there.
The HW+ decoder issue remains however. I'm still seeing the video track getting stuck on a single frame close at the start of H264 videos, until I skip forward or backward. Audio and subtitle tracks continue as normal. This behavior is completely inconsistent, seemingly random and not always occurring, even on the same video. This happened not even once during all my tests with the HW decoder, nor on any H265 video with the HW+ decoder. I will attempt to collect logs while reproducing and report back here once I succeed. (this could take a while)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks in advance. If you can provide the device logs, we will definitely look into the issue.

Thirumalai.K said:
Thanks in advance. If you can provide the device logs, we will definitely look into the issue.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I don't have any logs yet, but I came in to report what I believe to be relevant in case anyone else has the same issues: I think you were right about something being off with the system's decoders.
My Android TV device, a Philips 65PUS8102/12 TV, had performance issues with 4k videos and some very high bitrate Full HD videos. I grew fond of MX Player because its HW+ decoder was still capable of running 4k videos smoothly, where nothing else could. It was still a lot to process and skipping forward/backwards was pretty much impossible on these 4k videos because of it. Then there were the h264 issues I reported here, like the frozen frames. Oddly enough, while performance and skipping worked perfectly on both the HW+ and HW decoder for h264 videos, every player using HW acceleration including MX did stutter on some of the very high bitrate ones full hd videos (that still came nowhere near the 4k video bitrates).
A few days ago, Philips issued a massive software update that included both an Android update from 6.0.1 to 7.1.1, and bugfixes resolving 4k performance and some decoding issues. Right now, MX Player's HW+ decoder is no longer the only way for me to play 4k videos smoothly. What's more, skipping works perfectly on them now, and any reproducible issue I had on h264 (both performance-related and freezing frames) I haven't been able to reproduce since.
So if anyone faces the same issues as mine with my particular TV or another from Philips sharing the same software-base, make sure you're fully updated to the Android 7 release to presumably resolve at least several of these issues.

shvklatch said:
I don't have any logs yet, but I came in to report what I believe to be relevant in case anyone else has the same issues: I think you were right about something being off with the system's decoders.
My Android TV device, a Philips 65PUS8102/12 TV, had performance issues with 4k videos and some very high bitrate Full HD videos. I grew fond of MX Player because its HW+ decoder was still capable of running 4k videos smoothly, where nothing else could. It was still a lot to process and skipping forward/backwards was pretty much impossible on these 4k videos because of it. Then there were the h264 issues I reported here, like the frozen frames. Oddly enough, while performance and skipping worked perfectly on both the HW+ and HW decoder for h264 videos, every player using HW acceleration including MX did stutter on some of the very high bitrate ones full hd videos (that still came nowhere near the 4k video bitrates).
A few days ago, Philips issued a massive software update that included both an Android update from 6.0.1 to 7.1.1, and bugfixes resolving 4k performance and some decoding issues. Right now, MX Player's HW+ decoder is no longer the only way for me to play 4k videos smoothly. What's more, skipping works perfectly on them now, and any reproducible issue I had on h264 (both performance-related and freezing frames) I haven't been able to reproduce since.
So if anyone faces the same issues as mine with my particular TV or another from Philips sharing the same software-base, make sure you're fully updated to the Android 7 release to presumably resolve at least several of these issues.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
We are pleased to know that your issue is resolved.
As I have mentioned earlier, many of the issue with hardware accelerations are usually from the firmware itself. It can affect each app in a different manner based on their implementation. And finding a workaround without an actual device is also very difficult.
Thanks for providing the information about the firmware update. It will help us to guide our users if they are unaware of it.

Can screen size change the way a video file is played or handled?

Today my new TV arrived, I bought the xh90 to get myself ready for the upcoming gaming consoles, although the quality of the TV looks great, when I tried playing some files off my hard drive through the nvidia shield TV pro, 1 particular season always chops/screen freezes after a while, (this has only happend with this one series, all of the seasons are choppy) Everything else seems to play fine for now, also when I play the file through VLC everything seems to run smoothly, while with MX media player it does not.
The real kicker is on my previous TV the file is not choppy at all, neither with MX media player or VLC, the only difference seems to be my new TV is slightly bigger, 55 inch compared to my 41 inch previously. Does it perhaps have to do with the way MX media player encodes the file depending on what screen size you have?

bsgapollo said:
Today my new TV arrived, I bought the xh90 to get myself ready for the upcoming gaming consoles, although the quality of the TV looks great, when I tried playing some files off my hard drive through the nvidia shield TV pro, 1 particular season always chops/screen freezes after a while, (this has only happend with this one series, all of the seasons are choppy) Everything else seems to play fine for now, also when I play the file through VLC everything seems to run smoothly, while with MX media player it does not.
The real kicker is on my previous TV the file is not choppy at all, neither with MX media player or VLC, the only difference seems to be my new TV is slightly bigger, 55 inch compared to my 41 inch previously. Does it perhaps have to do with the way MX media player encodes the file depending on what screen size you have?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
We would like to let you know that MX Player's HW/HW+ decoders make use of the hardware acceleration provided by your device. So, the performance will heavily rely on the multimedia capabilities of your device.
Regarding your issues, could you please specify the decoder used? MX Player's HW decoder directly use the android mediaplayer framework. In case if you noticed glitches with HW decoder, it might be caused by a firmware bug. Please click/tap on the HW button on the playback screen and try HW+ decoder. It may fix the issue.

MXPlayer said:
We would like to let you know that MX Player's HW/HW+ decoders make use of the hardware acceleration provided by your device. So, the performance will heavily rely on the multimedia capabilities of your device.
Regarding your issues, could you please specify the decoder used? MX Player's HW decoder directly use the android mediaplayer framework. In case if you noticed glitches with HW decoder, it might be caused by a firmware bug. Please click/tap on the HW button on the playback screen and try HW+ decoder. It may fix the issue.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Switching to HW+ fixed the problem for me, around 90% of my files are able to play through HW+ now, the rest I have to switch back and forth between mostly SW and sometimes HW.
I'm glad there is an option as well to "always play files through HW+ decoder", otherwise I would have to re-select the encoder every time I would want to play a file from HW to HW+.
You're the only person who replied and I'm grateful since that was enough to help me resolve the issue.