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Does Samsung Video Player Have Hardware Acceleration?

Does the Samsung Video Player have hardware acceleration? It's the only explanation I can come up with because it can play 720P MP4 videos just fine, whereas video players from the Market can't. Plus, it seems that the battery life is much better if I use the Samsung Video Player to watch videos whenever possible.

geokilla said:
Does the Samsung Video Player have hardware acceleration? It's the only explanation I can come up with because it can play 720P MP4 videos just fine, whereas video players from the Market can't. Plus, it seems that the battery life is much better if I use the Samsung Video Player to watch videos whenever possible.
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Yes. There are several players from the market that can also use hardware acceleration (ie. RockPlayer, mVideoPlayer), but they can only do so with formats that the stock video player supports. If the phone doesn't support hardware playback of a certain format using the stock player, then you have to use a software playback with RockPlayer, QQplayer, vPlayer, etc. (which is very suboptimal for high-res video in terms of quality and performance).

Yes it does due to the framework that samsung uses. Thus video deciding is done by the gpu rather than cpu.
As long as the 3rd party video player you choose can use the default codecs, it will have the same performance as samsungs video player. However most are based on ffmpeg decoders.
If you plan to use a non samsung based rom. The open codecs will use ffmpeg decoder which will do processing via cpu.
Further explanation http://code.google.com/p/cyanogenmod7-for-samsung-galaxys/issues/detail?id=39

ohh nice to know...

NVIDIA Tegra 2 optimized Video Player

Found this at the transformer forum..
*Phi* said:
Just thought i'll share,
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.mxtech.videoplayer.ad&feature=more_from_developer
its a multi-format player called MX videoplayer(in case the market link doesnt work).
so far seems good, comparable to mobo player
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Couldn't agree more.
regards

Thanks! Best player so far!

Wish there was a no-ads option, but it's good.

ZanshinG1 said:
Wish there was a no-ads option, but it's good.
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I'm going to send a note to the Dev telling him he should make a Paid, No-Ads option. A while back someone posted a ~95MB .mkv of Planet Earth in 1080P, and while MX player doesn't play it in any usable FPS, no other Xoom player I've seen will even attempt to touch it.
I'd pay $5 for this one. I'm just surprised how limited the Tegra2 HW codecs are; so many of the videos I have play in SW mode (but then again, maybe NVidia hasn't released all the specs necessary to take advantage of them?)

I really don't get why anyone wants 1080p playback (unless it's for HDMI of course) since it's a 16:10 1280x800 screen, which is 720p (plus the extra 80 rows of pixels for the menu bar).

kcrudup said:
I'm going to send a note to the Dev telling him he should make a Paid, No-Ads option. A while back someone posted a ~95MB .mkv of Planet Earth in 1080P, and while MX player doesn't play it in any usable FPS, no other Xoom player I've seen will even attempt to touch it.
I'd pay $5 for this one. I'm just surprised how limited the Tegra2 HW codecs are; so many of the videos I have play in SW mode (but then again, maybe NVidia hasn't released all the specs necessary to take advantage of them?)
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really nice player indeed.
...but would even kill for a player with playback rate control and pitch correction through... (any dev listening? =] )

brandogg said:
I really don't get why anyone wants 1080p playback (unless it's for HDMI of course) since it's a 16:10 1280x800 screen, which is 720p (plus the extra 80 rows of pixels for the menu bar).
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because no one wants to reencode before watching.

I tested with 720p mkv movies and not work. Screen remains black, but is not running. Any tip? Mobo Player run 720p, but slow or dropping frames.

I have only tested MxVideoPlayer on divx/avi files and it is very similar to Moboplayer. I'd pay for a paid app also without adds if they would add/fix a few things below..
- Auto Rotate option.
- video playback should have option of resume or start over. I found a few bugs playing/resuming on videos that were incomplete. MxVideoPlayer would then show Video Playing Error when clicking on play because video was stuck on that *end spot*. The fix was to reset counters in preference to fix.
- add next/previous video button to toolbar and auto play next video in preferences.
Fix the above and remove adds and then I'll pay for that app.

brandogg said:
I really don't get why anyone wants 1080p playback (unless it's for HDMI of course) since it's a 16:10 1280x800 screen, which is 720p (plus the extra 80 rows of pixels for the menu bar).
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Who wants 1080(p)?

1080p will be on the Xoom 2..the screen on that thing goes way beyond 1080p.
Sent from my DROIDX using XDA App

Well I guess I get it if you have a 1080p movie that you want to watch on your PC, PS3, etc, and don't want to download (or *ahem* re-encode) a 720p version. That makes sense then.

I'm intrigued by, and appreciative of, the suggestion. I did download and try it, but I don't see anything to tear me away from Act 1 (which I've been quite happy with). Probably, I don't understand which format to use - but, I tried re-encoding a movie at 1080 and MX Video wouldn't play it any better than Act 1. Which is to say, I got a "format not supported" message and no joy...

Any ideas why this app (MX videoplayer) needs our GPS location?

this app is cool.
Thanks for sharing.
REgards

you guys see a diff between s/w code and h/w codec. Seems the same

It is not working for me, are there requirements for specific mkv codecs?? my mkv files never worked proporly 3.0, 3.1 or 3.2 with mobo, rockplayer or this one (just tried with 3.2)

Nothing will play in HW, it all plays SW. Even when I uninstall and reinstall both the app and codec.
Thanks happened to me with Mobo Player as well.
Stock, non-rooted, US WiFi only on 3.2.
Any ideas?

Timbledore said:
Nothing will play in HW, it all plays SW. Even when I uninstall and reinstall both the app and codec.
Thanks happened to me with Mobo Player as well.
Stock, non-rooted, US WiFi only on 3.2.
Any ideas?
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What kind of files are you trying to play? HW mode means that the app will make use of the Tegra2 hardware acceleration.
That means it will be subjected to the limitations of the Tegra 2 chip. The Tegra 2 chip can only decode certain 720p h264 formats with certain profiles and up to a certain bitrate. Let's not even go into 1080p.
Not only that, the Tegra 2 can only decode certain audio streams as well, so if your videos are in AC3 audio, you have to reencode the audio to something like AAC.
You can use a program like Mediainfo to check what formats your video files are in.
Edit: I think some folks are still not familiar with video formats and what the extensions mean. Mkv is just a container format for video files, similar to Avi. What's important is what codecs are used to encode the video and audio streams.
For example Avi files usually have divx/xvid encoded video streams and mp3 audio streams, mkv files have h264/mpeg4 AVC video streams and AC3/AAC audio streams.
So 3rd party apps are just able to open up these video containers and attempt to decode the video and audio streams for your viewing.
But they will use the CPU to process them using the app's built in codecs where possible if the chipset doesn't support it.
You can refer to the official specs of the Tegra 2 to determine what kind of video/audio compression formats it can decode.
So technically, the Xoom can playback avi files encoded with divx but because using software to decode requires some licencing fee in certain scenarios so that's why Honeycomb has no basic support because being "open source", Google did not pay for the licenses to playback some of the supported video formats. I may be wrong about this but it makes sense.
If you see other tablets like the Transformer or the Acer Iconia, you will realize they can playback more formats because the manufacturers probably paid for extra licenses and added playback capability into the OS. At least that's what I figured out.

musashiken said:
What kind of files are you trying to play? HW mode means that the app will make use of the Tegra2 hardware acceleration.
That means it will be subjected to the limitations of the Tegra 2 chip. The Tegra 2 chip can only decode certain 720p h264 formats with certain profiles and up to a certain bitrate. Let's not even go into 1080p.
Not only that, the Tegra 2 can only decode certain audio streams as well, so if your videos are in AC3 audio, you have to reencode the audio to something like AAC.
You can use a program like Mediainfo to check what formats your video files are in.
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Thanks, these are mostly xVid with AC3.
Mainly TV shows that I have missed. I rarely have time at home to catch up and more time on the move.

[Q] How to play most HD videos (720p/1080) Galaxy tab?

Hi,
I am trying to find out following:
I would like to use Galaxy Tab 8.9 (7300/stock HoneyComb 3.1) to play video on my HDTV (Full HD via HDMI adapter). However almost all the apps that I have tested seem to produce dropped frames or problems with sync with audio/video during playback for number of mkv/mp4/avi media files I have tested. I was able to play normally some of the full HD videos but that was in only few cases while most of 720p/1080p would have poor playback. So I am looking for an advice:
1) Will updating to ICS (now only custom roms available) help with video playback?
2) Are there any apps that you found that can play most of full hd videos? I have tried almost all the popular ones but could not get to cover full HD?
3) Will overclocking help with decoding? I saw several posts that indicate that some custom roms support overclocking. In some cases I got SW based playback to give almost good playback (HW based decoding did not work in all cases).
4) What is proper approach for mounting external drives that are in formats such as NTFS/exFAT? I am looking at this as some files might be bigger then 4GB limit of FAT32.
5) Is there a device that I can stream to 1080p from Galaxy Tab 8.9? Of course assuming that Galaxy Tab 8.9 can stream 1080p...
6) Do you have any other advice?
7) There are number of custom ROMs available (as listed in http://forum.xda-developers.com/forumdisplay.php?f=1441). Which one would you recommend for best video performance?
Kind regards,
Bo

Just got a Tab 8.9 and really struggling with this as well so keen to hear responses.

1) Will updating to ICS (now only custom roms available) help with video playback?
The GTab8.9 is Tegra 2 powered and will always struggle with HD playback, regardless of ROM or player. Good video player apps, I like MXPlayer, can mitigate it a little.
2) Are there any apps that you found that can play most of full hd videos? I have tried almost all the popular ones but could not get to cover full HD?
I like MX Player, but Vplayer is solid, but costs money. You will not find one that can play all 720p videos smoothly, and forget about an 1080p videos. Unless the bitrate is so low as to basically be low def, it won't happen.
3) Will overclocking help with decoding? I saw several posts that indicate that some custom roms support overclocking. In some cases I got SW based playback to give almost good playback (HW based decoding did not work in all cases).
Maybe a little, not worth it IMO.
4) What is proper approach for mounting external drives that are in formats such as NTFS/exFAT? I am looking at this as some files might be bigger then 4GB limit of FAT32.
I'm not sure on this, I will defer to others.
5) Is there a device that I can stream to 1080p from Galaxy Tab 8.9? Of course assuming that Galaxy Tab 8.9 can stream 1080p...
The GTab8.9 will struggle to play most 720p, forget about any 1080p.
6) Do you have any other advice?
I like the GTab 8.9 for its size, but a media power house it is not. If you want to play all manner of HD videos, then you're going to need a tablet with a Tegra 3 or better. Perhaps the upcoming Kindle Fire HD 8.9 or Nook+ HD 9, with their OMAP4470/SGX544s, will handle better and keep the smaller size.
7) There are number of custom ROMs available (as listed in http://forum.xda-developers.com/forumdisplay.php?f=1441). Which one would you recommend for best video performance?
I have not tried any custom roms myself yet. The video playback is a hardware limitation and a known weak point of the Tegra 2 SoC. Roms and players can attempt to mitigate it, but its not possible to resolve it.

Try vlc
Sent from my GT-I9100 using Tapatalk

UnwiredDroid said:
Try vlc
Sent from my GT-I9100 using Tapatalk
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For some reason VLC is not compatible with the device...

I've got my NTFS flash stick running perfectly... with USM mass storage watcher...

Flash rom with ics by tracid..no problem with 720p playback even with stock video player :good:

hwooei said:
Flash rom with ics by tracid..no problem with 720p playback even with stock video player :good:
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Did you have problems with 720p with HoneyComb before? How much did it improve your performance?

Bo... said:
Did you have problems with 720p with HoneyComb before? How much did it improve your performance?
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Hc laggy on 720p playback..with ics rom no laggy wih 720p playback even with stock video player..or try bsplay**..support hardware acceleration..

hwooei said:
Hc laggy on 720p playback..with ics rom no laggy wih 720p playback even with stock video player..or try bsplay**..support hardware acceleration..
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The BS player gave me the best playback but not always smooth on 720p. Thanks for the info.... Great news....

2) In MX Player, turn on H/W+ mode in Settings>Decoding. This plays back 720p video (with a tiny audio lag) on stock Honeycomb 3.2. It's not going to do much to help you with 1080p though -- it's probable that nothing will.

you can run 720p or 1080p fluid.. spawndk from the eepad transformer forum:
"The Tegra2 chipset are designed as a mobile sollution chipset - to support web 2 standards. The highest encoding profile used here (Youtube 1080p) are 1080p baseline and this the Tegra2 chipset will both record and play with no troubles. As well as 720p baseline and main profile - but only upto L3.1 with some limitations. It doesnt matter which container is used (mkv, mp4, m4v, avi etc) and it doesnt matter if resolution are 1080p - its only a matter of the encoding profile used to encode the supported video format H264
Tegra2 will NEVER be able to decode High profile L4.1 encodes - it's not a software issue, neither in terms of Honeycomb or Nvidia libs, its simply a limitation of the abilities of the hardwaredecoder in the Tegra2 chipset and this will never change. It is also not a limitation in the Transformer specifically, but a limitation in ALL Tegra2 based tablets and mobilephones.
This is the same reason why some mediaplayers like the Boxee Box that was originally intended to use the Tegra2 moved on to an Intel chipset before launch.
In short the Tegra2 chipset will support playback of videos encoded in 1080p or 720p resolution, using the H264 video codec and AAC audio codec - as long as the video are encoded after the baseline profile standard
It will not now or ever - play 1080p/720p encodes encoded after the high profile standard."
So basically, you have to reencode videos just like on ipad..

Hi10?

Any idea if this SoC can handle it i.e krait with h/w(+)? I don't care about other issues like color banding or blocks I just wanna know if can decode hi10 videoes with hardware or not.

Yami-chan said:
Any idea if this SoC can handle it i.e krait with h/w(+)? I don't care about other issues like color banding or blocks I just wanna know if can decode hi10 videoes with hardware or not.
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h/w decoding.. not sure.
MX Player on my T will play 10bit video files in s/w fine.

Just as any device made in 2011 or later with a dualcore cpu @ 1ghz or better it'll play 10bit "fine" in s/w mode. However, that is neither my question nor my point. If it's that hard to just try out a file in h/w+ then I might as well try else wear.

Point me to a file and I'll gladly run a test for you. Np.

I watch quite a bit of anime, and a lot of releases nowadays are 10-bit only and in 1280 x 720 resolution. I use MX Player now, but I've used Moboplayer previously with the same results.
My findings were as follows:
- All 10-bit video goes through the software decoder. MX and Mobo player both will refuse to use hardware mode, complaining that the video is not supported.
- The software decoder can handle 10-bit 720p video reasonably well, so long as there is not a lot of fast motion. When that kind of scene occurs, audio and video will start to desync, and it usually needs a pause and/or manual fast forward/rewind to get the audio and video back in sync.
- If you use soft subtitles (such as in an MKV file), the above desync will be far more likely to happen and far more pronounced. It also makes it very clear that the problem is with the video software decoder, as the soft subs and the audio will always remain more or less in sync.
In comparison:
- 8-bit videos of up to 1080p play via the hardware decoder and hence are silky smooth.
- Soft subtitles are not a problem for such videos.
All these findings are *not* group/encoder specific. 10-bit 720p videos from *any* fansubbing group will always go through s/w, and will always lag at fast action points.
Notes:
- I have not tried watching a lower res 10-bit video on the phone, primarily because nobody in the fansubbing scene releases a 10-bit video at less than 720p. There is a possibility that the software decoder will be able to play lower res 10-bit video with no problems.
- There is the possibility that the encoding settings that most fansubbers use are ridiculously and unnecessarily high in bitrate, or have some other settings that basically cause the software decoder on our phones to choke on the videos. I cannot confirm this nor do I have connections to current fansubbers who could share their settings.
- There is the possibility that it's Sony's implementation of the software decoder that is at fault. Turning the Bravia engine on and off doesn't seem to have an effect, but other parts of the software decoder that are beyond user control may simply be inefficient.
Lastly, according to my reading, so far the only chipsets that *can* run soft-subbed 720p 10-bit videos more or less flawlessly are the 4-cores. The 4-core Tegra 3 certainly can, with tweaking. I think the Exynos and 4-core Qualcomms can too, but I can't confirm it. I'm not sure if any of these have hardware decoder support for 10-bit.

Try Dice player or VLC from the market. I'm not absolutely sure but I believe those use their own decoding framework and you might get better results.

Yami-chan said:
Just as any device made in 2011 or later with a dualcore cpu @ 1ghz or better it'll play 10bit "fine" in s/w mode. However, that is neither my question nor my point. If it's that hard to just try out a file in h/w+ then I might as well try else wear.
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Well with that kind of attitude I shall not help you in the future.
Sent from my Xperia T using XDA Premium

I've already had friends test up multiple SoC's, and it seems only Tegra 3 has the instructions set for Hi10, thanks though. Again, any device with a 1Ghz dual-core SoC will handle 8bit videos flawlessly up to 1080p with h/w. And once again I keep getting answers that they CAN play 10bit files with s/w which again was never part of the question. Most players for android are based on ffmpeg which kinda defeats the purpose of trying others apart from the renderer itself.
And for those wondering, the limitation comes from your SoC not the player in the long run.

Video playback. Help.

Anyone facing video playback problem? If I try to play a 720p or higher resolution video, the playback is very choppy as though frame rate has dropped. The play speed also jumps by 2 seconds. This is in VLC player. If I play from the phone original player, same problem but without audio.
I have tried only avi format since that's what I get from torrent.
Am I supposed to do something for a smooth playback or should I dump this beautiful phone?

I had problems woth a LITTLE choppy videos in FHD only. How choppy are those u mention? Unbearable choppy or noticeably choppy? Also, is ur battery mode set on performance (which I think is on default) and are you on the latest software?

Have you tried MX player? I use it and don't have issues with 1080p videos. You can choose how MX decodes the video, HW, HW+, or software. VLC still isn't the greatest on Android.

oTToToTenTanz said:
I had problems woth a LITTLE choppy videos in FHD only. How choppy are those u mention? Unbearable choppy or noticeably choppy? Also, is ur battery mode set on performance (which I think is on default) and are you on the latest software?
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Yes it is noticeably choppy. And battery has been set to performance. Latest software too. Audio of the video is ac3, i think.

bunnybash said:
Have you tried MX player? I use it and don't have issues with 1080p videos. You can choose how MX decodes the video, HW, HW+, or software. VLC still isn't the greatest on Android.
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Yes, I did try MX player but it seems to be worse there. The audio is not even supported. At least it did in VLC. AUDiO: 192 CBR AC3 2.0. Can it play xvid and avi well? I mean the phone.

Did you try software decoding?