Develop Bugs

Has anyone been able to test Xvid or Divx playback?

Hope someone can offer me some advice. Video playback is very high on my priorities. I currently have an Omnia which is pretty flawless playing back DIVX or XVID encoded files. I am not interested in playing back High Def content, only xvid/divx avi files that I download such as TV and DVD Rips.
How good is the Touch Pro 2 with Coreplayer, I am pretty worried from all that I read about HTC/Qualcomm drivers not working properly and this is a deal breaker for me. I don't know if the Touch Pro 2 is the same, I know it has the same processor.
I have been out of contract for a couple of months and was waiting to get an Iphone but I will have to encode all my xvid files in order for them to play, at least until Coreplayer for Iphone is released. I was happy with my Omnia but I seem to have endless problems with getting programs working as they should and of course there is no official support on this site.
If video playback is ok for these type of files I may go for either the Diamond 2/Touch Pro 2 or Touch HD as they all seem to be a similiar spec.

meddleuk said:
Hope someone can offer me some advice. Video playback is very high on my priorities. I currently have an Omnia which is pretty flawless playing back DIVX or XVID encoded files. I am not interested in playing back High Def content, only xvid/divx avi files that I download such as TV and DVD Rips.
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If video playback is ok for these type of files I may go for either the Diamond 2/Touch Pro 2 or Touch HD as they all seem to be a similiar spec.
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These play flawlessly on my antiquated Vogue as long as they are encoded properly, so I think there's no reason to suspect they will play any worse on the TP2. Perhaps the additional resolution, I suppose. But my experience has been that video on HTC is good stuff.

I read a review that it plays Xvid without any drop frames but can't play Dvix properly.
If you don't mind re-encoding your downloaded videos using the Video GUI, then you won't have any problems. I use it for my HD and it plays very very well at 624x352 resolution.
All you need to do is let it run over night and download it to your phone in the morning. Easy huh?

I want to be able to play all movie types.

I dont want to have to worry about decoding, or converting, or anything at all. I just want to click on a movie file, and play it. Is there any player out there(free) that can do that?

Vplayer is like that, and WAS free until about 3 days ago. you can give rockplayer a try, it isnt bad.

It really depends on the type of file you are trying to play (there are tons of video formats/containers out there). If you use some obscure format, you should search for it (try either directly in the market or on this site).
For the more commonly-used types though, popular choices on this forum include RockPlayer and VPlayer (not as popular now because it has become a paid app). Some people also like arcMedia. I believe there is also a ported version of mPlayer in the main app forum. Supposedly, VLC for Android will be coming out soon as well.
I've been using VPlayer without any issues, though I'm interested to try VLC once it comes out. RockPlayer also worked well for me before VPlayer came out.

okay well i found a 4 day old vplayer.apk online. we'll see what that does.
Edit: it flickers, a lot. Is it always like that?

I heard VLC is coming out soon for Android (sometime this month). If so and if it's anything like the PC version it should play pretty much anything.

Not sure about ISO (not sure if you need that), but for common formats like AVI, WMV, MP4, I find Rockplayer to be the best. It handles every video I've thrown at it. Although sometimes I need to pick either hardware decoding off/on depending on the video. With it off, some WMV videos lag. With it on, some AVI videos FC the program.
Vplayer lags into slow-motion on some WMV movies, and also has some pixelation for a few seconds while scanning through a few AVI videos. But otherwise a pretty decent player also.
ArcMedia was a very poor player, to me. It lagged on WMV videos. Interface needed lots of work (displayed file names too short, no landscape browsing). Inferior to both Rockplayer and vPlayer. Similarly, I tried mPlayer, file compatibility was not great, and the interface was really clunky. It takes too much time to navigate and find the desired video.

yeah when i said all formats, i really meant all the like, common ones. but more than just mpeg, and wmv. so divx and h264 is about as much as i need. I got vplayer installed now, the beta. the beta is pretty good, i wouldnt mind paying for it. I mean i would mind, because its just a damn video player, but i also wouldnt mind it. but it flickers a lot. is that normal?

I haven't noticed any flickering on vPlayer, that's odd. Is it evident just watching a video for a couple minutes (I mostly use Rockplayer)?

I have never had any flickering with vplayer. Try setting the lum at a level. Move your finger up on the left half of the screen while watching a video.

Video playback on android is a bit of a problem still. Problem is that the built-in player only recognizes a few containers, and these containers are very restricted in the content they can carry.
There are some other players that are more universal, but a design limitation of android makes it impossible for them to use the integrated video decoder to accelerate decode. As a result, these players will have a very low performance and drain your battery fast due to running the CPU hard.

[Q] HD Video Playback and Framerate

Before I start, let me clarify that this is about playback of stored videos files (avi, mp4, wmv, mov, etc), not recording frame rate or the playback of recorded videos from the phone. Searching yielded hundreds of results, but none of them fit the scope of my question as far as I could tell. If there is something out there, please link and excuse this question.
So, my question and issue is pretty straight forward: whenever I try to play video files I have (IE: downloaded mp4 files), I get really really poor frame rates. Poor meaning 7-13 frames per second.
So the video sucks, and plays in a fairly smooth slow motion. The sound is fine, causing the video to go out of sync, and once the audio timeline ends the video file closes. The built-in player won't even load them, but RockPlayer does. I think I tried xyplayer as well. I figure this is just a codec / software issue, but all lower resolution video files (same format) play fine, so it seems to be unrelated to the applications I'm using. 800x640 video files, no problem; 1280x720 video files, not gonna happen. The videos play fine on a computer, obviously, and my buddy's Windows Phone 7 plays them fine as well (Zune software).
Any ideas?

what bitrate are the videos that skip?

I don't have many on my phone right now, but one of them is 741Kbps, about one third larger than another video that plays perfectly fine, albeit at a lower resolution. Admittedly I know very little about video encoding and all of that.

What rom are you using?

Currently Burnt Droid (1.4), but I've had the same problem on other roms (sense). I recall having this issue on an AOSP rom once, but I can't say that with complete confidence.

Bump; is this really not an issue for people? I can try and grab a sample video if that helps? I figured this would be a more global thing, not just me. The main reason I need (or want) this to work is because all of my online class lectures are recorded in this format and being able to watch the lectures on the go would be extremely beneficial.

I can play a 4gb hd rip of avatar on my phone in rockplayer (hardware mode) with no skipping
please post a link to a vid your having problems with

NewZJ said:
I can play a 4gb hd rip of avatar on my phone in rockplayer (hardware mode) with no skipping.
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Hmm, ok, so it took that sentence for me to realize I'm an idiot. I've tried hardware mode with every video file I have put on my phone (avi, mp4, wmv), but wasn't surprised when they didn't play-- if they did, couldn't I just use the stock video player?-- but my school files for example are .mp4, which should play, but I guess the system player doesn't support whatever encoding/bitrate these videos are made with? Does this mean I won't get this to work unless I re-encode / convert the files I have into a new mp4 the phone will support natively?
Excuse my ignorance on the issue; I guess my understanding of the application and android system is more limited than I initially thought.

[Q] Choppy video - used to work okay. No video in native player, either

I've been experiencing some choppy video problems on my myTouch Slide. I know phones are somewhat notorious for this, but the weird thing in my case is that it used to work just fine and now it won't. Same video file (a movie in WMV format), same media player (arcMedia), now it won't work.
So I thought "it's probably a problem with arcMedia." So I tried RockPlayer. Same problem. Then I tried streaming flash video on Dolphin HD (which also used to work provided the video was buffered). Same problem.
So I grabbed an MP4 off of NASA's website and tried it on the native player. I don't get any video, just sound. From what I can tell this video should play just fine: H264 video codec and everything.
I'm new to Android but not new to computers and tech.
Any ideas?

Well what changed? Did you install any new apps that may be running in the background? Did you flash another rom or something since the last time you played this wmv file?
What was the resolution of the MP4 off the NASA site? If it was HD that is probably the reason why you get no video.

Perfect XviD playback on the TP2

Since purchasing my TP2, I've labored under the belief (supported by a lot of other users) that xvid playback had to be choppy, and if I wanted smooth video (even encoded SD, 640x480ish), I had to convert my files to h264. I have an HTPC and compress all my shows into xvid, always have, and have no desire to change, so I basically abandoned watching video on my handset.
I was trying out a new tip today for better performance (muxing the same old files into an mp4 container without conversion) when my control file (same old avi/xvid to compare performance with) played absolutely perfectly. Not the hiccupy, choppy, 3-7fps I remember from when I first tried it, but smooth as silk. What the frak? I never even got around to trying my new tip out.
I grabbed an older file of the same show, also avi/xvid but WMP wouldn't open it and TCPMP played it at the 3-7FPS choppy unwatchable speed I remember from the old days. The only difference in the new file is that instead of using an mp3 audio track, I had stream copied the original AC3 audio track to deal with a sync issue I had with that particular recording. The video in both has the same xvid encoding by the same program with the same settings.
I'm preparing another test as I write to ensure that is the only difference between these two files. I'll take the same HD mpeg2, convert it into 1 xvid+mp3 and another xvid+ac3 with all other settings identical and compare their performance. I'll try mp2 audio as well (for my analog recordings). In the meantime, can anyone explain why mp3 audio would cause otherwise playable video of modest resolution to slow to a crawl?