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[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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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 encoding

I'm going to be travelling on Monday and plan on tossing a couple videos on the phone to watch. My question is what format/codec should I encode them to for best battery life?

dotpkmdot said:
I'm going to be travelling on Monday and plan on tossing a couple videos on the phone to watch. My question is what format/codec should I encode them to for best battery life?
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Click to collapse
I can't really find much info on codecs vs. battery life, but theoretically whatever minimizes CPU usage would be your best bet. All the video I've played on my Infuse runs the CPU at 400MHz, so the codec might be pretty negligible as long as the stock video player supports it.
Another factor would be your source material: what kind? Is it HD? Can your phone already play the videos as-is?
For 720p or higher content that I must re-encode, I use x264 on the 'slower' preset, constant quality with a crf of between 16 and 17.5. For 16:9 widescreen video, I resize with spline36 resize filter to 800x450 resolution. I use VSfilter to hardsub subtitles if necessary (using an AVS script). For audio, I use AAC constant quality @ q somewhere around 0.66 (keeping original sample rate up to 48KHz). You can downmix surround audio tracks using a variety of programs, or with filters in an AVS script. I mux everything into an MP4 container for maximum compatibility (MKV seems to give me sporadic seek issues with some files for some reason). I mainly use MeGUI with x264 and NeroAAC for my encoding and MP4box or mkvtoolnix for muxing.

Thanks for the help, I've got some time today so I might try a couple videos in different formats, try and see if CPU usage stays the same between them.
None of the videos are HD quality and all are with the xvid codec. The reason I initially asked was because if I remember correctly the iphone has a hardware decoder for x264 format videos to help ease pressure on the CPU, which in turn helps with battery life. I was curious if the same held for the Infuse.

dotpkmdot said:
Thanks for the help, I've got some time today so I might try a couple videos in different formats, try and see if CPU usage stays the same between them.
None of the videos are HD quality and all are with the xvid codec. The reason I initially asked was because if I remember correctly the iphone has a hardware decoder for x264 format videos to help ease pressure on the CPU, which in turn helps with battery life. I was curious if the same held for the Infuse.
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Click to collapse
The phone should already play Xvid without wasting any more battery than H.264 (btw, x264 is the encoder, not the format). There's no benefit from re-encoding Xvid to H.264 unless the source is higher quality than the phone will display. But if your testing yields any interesting results, please share them

This is the guide that I follow and it works like a champ.
http://www.knowyourcell.com/samsung...d_transfer_them_to_the_samsung_infuse_4g.html

[Q] Overclocking to improve 720P MKV playback

Hi Guys ,
In my samsung gt-1010p is an ARM A8 processor,
I've been doing quite some research in overclocking on android and still have not figured it out with certainty.
my question being:
Will overclocking the CPU influence the playback of 720p?
Thanks!
Xyus89

Not in any significant way. You'd be better off re-encoding the file at a lower bitrate using something like Handbrake.

I'm assuming apps such as OneClickLagFix won't improve 720P playback either?
Is there any other way of improving 720P playback through changes to the device itself?
Thanks ofr your reply btw!

xyus89 said:
I'm assuming apps such as OneClickLagFix won't improve 720P playback either?
Is there any other way of improving 720P playback through changes to the device itself?
Thanks ofr your reply btw!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The best you can hope for is that one video player app is better than another. Have you tried all the popular players? vplayer, moboplayer, etc?
High bitrates are the biggest issue though. Encode your vids to mp4 with a sensible bitrate and they'll run much better.

Video Playback on this phone is really slow, even when playing AVI files on MX Player

Has anybody else experienced this issue? Dice player is slow as hell too. Is there a setting that needs to be changed before the One XL will play video correctly or do video players need to be updated to work with the S4 processor?

One thing's for sure, video playback on devices optimized for particular encoding settings is optimum when those are followed.
Having said that, I have no problem playing 720p encodes in H.264 format using Handbrake with a profile that is based of the standard high profile but with B-frames, CABAC, 8x8 transform and weighted P-frames all turned off. These aren't necessarily the settings needed for optimal playback on THIS device but they are what I use for reliable playback on my Tegra 2 based Galaxy Tab 10.1 and those files that I've encoded for that play just as well on my One X.
I just dragged over a 1080p video shot on my Nikon D7000 onto my One X without any conversion at all and it plays perfectly fine using Dice Player. I was surprised.
Wonder if it's your encodes.

So far the best performance I've gotten on AVI without re-encoding is Bsplayer.
Sent from my HTC One X using XDA

In MX Player, change from "H/W" mode in the top right to "S/W (fast)" - see if that helps.

Another vote for BSPlayer. I was a big Rock Player proponent for a long time. But it doesn't seem to be updated any longer.
Also, similar to another previous response, forcing from HW to SW mode may help. Its a bit of a crap shoot depending on the encoding settings and codec used. But BS Player works for most things.

what if..
neocryte said:
In MX Player, change from "H/W" mode in the top right to "S/W (fast)" - see if that helps.
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i tried this but it says that "H/W decoder is not supported.. what should i do? thank you for the help..