As the title states I got the MHL today. Output to a 73" 1080p DLP, 55" Samsung LED 7000 series smart TV, 50" 1080p Panasonic Plasma, and 39" 1080p westinghouse LED all produce similar results... and if I do say so myself, it's really bad.
Lets see where to begin:
The Good:
-Watching 1080p content from local or network storage produces a pretty good picture
-Text is sharp, webpages look great
-Phone charges while mirroring
The Bad:
-Audio output is descent at best through HDMI, when connected with a very nice surround sound decoder it only decodes as "multi-channel", so DTS and other streams are not preserved on output
-Lag. And let me say this again... LAG. Don't even bother playing a game, it's unbearable. The phone experiences no lag while mirroring, but the output is about 1/3 the framerate.
-Lag on movies. On every TV the lag was exactly the same, whether I hardware decode or software decode the lag is present. Youtube videos look laggy even.
-Netflix does not properly mirror. I presume this is related to HDCP or copy prevention, but streaming HD content to the phone produces a nice widescreen image on the phone, but the output to the connected monitor is pure crap. Take a nice 720p HD movie, compress it using the bitrate of a low quality MP3, transmit it via AM radio to your least favorite country somehow, and then watch it on a ****ty color TV from the 1980's. This is my experience with Netflix output. Also, you can tell it is not "mirroring" because when you tap the screen, the position slider appears on the phone but not the TV.
-Cannot turn screen off while mirroring
All in all, I'm somewhat pissed off. In its present state I would have preferred the phone not support HDMI. I would accept this as a "Oh hey the phone doesn't technically support MHL HDMI mirroring but we hacked it and look what we can do" but this is definitely not a finished product to advertise. Anyone else experience similar problems? Anybody have HD output with no lag? Maybe I have a defective MHL adapter/phone?
I think you may have a defective adapter/cable. I got the adapter tip today and most of your cons were nonexistent for me -
Audio Output - I don't know much about audio but I have a 5.1 surround sound setup and it worked perfectly.
Lag - I had 0 lag. I played a racing game and watched a few episodes of Breaking Bad (MKV so the phone was working hard at decoding it too) and I had no lag.
Turning screen off - I see this as a pro since you cant accidentally turn it off while mirroring
But this brings me to my point about netflix...
Netflix has been horrible with MHL on my last 3 phones, including this one. If I try to watch a 16:9 HD show on netflix through MHL, it plays fine on the phone but becomes 4:3 on my 16:9 HDTV somehow. I don't know why this happens, but if there was a way to make it mirror exactly what was on the screen, that wouldn't happen.
I'm actually quite pleased since the signal is very solid with this phone. With previous phones, the signal constantly dropped and reconnected. I tried every cable but it was a no go.
The Netflix I don't believe is the phones fault directly, I think it has to do with Netflix restricting output. As for the lag, I will return the unit as defective if I can and get another one. Hopefully that's the problem, the lag is incredibly noticeable for me. Audio wise, it's not bad, but I don't see why it can't just output (or at least give as an option) uncompressed audio from the source. My main irk is the framerate I've seen, hopefully it's limited to this unit. Anybody else experience lag or more importantly not experience any?
I ran Netflix ok.. but same ratio issues as above... didn't look great but was ok. Any regular video files looked great.. but I had to order 2 adapters before I got the right one.
Sent from my SPH-L710 using xda app-developers app
I also received my MHL adapter in the mail today. I like the picture quality and sound quality on my 42" 720p plasma, but I am wondering if it supports headphone port output somehow.
I got a connector also, but does seem to work with my monocable NHL,
Sent from my SPH-L710 using xda premium
I have a Samsung mhl and it works great
Sent using my Galaxy S III
I just used the official Samsung one today to deliver a training for a few new hires, and it worked perfectly. I had a full 10 slide powerpoint, afterwards I opened up the camera app and used the connected LCD screen as the viewfinder.
Issues with the MHL adapter lag, and possible fix
I have noticed similar problems as the OP. About an 1/8 of a second lag when trying to play SNES. For those of you who wanted to retro game with a bluetooth controller (like a PS3 sixaxis) I was able to get it to work. It could be my TV, but I got the lag down well below a second, enough so that you can play a game like donkey kong country and dodge opponents. The game plays at 30Hz which isn't the best frame rate, but fine for SNES.
The TV is a Samsung 1080p and there are two options that I enabled that seemed to help; video game mode, and BD mode. I don't think the TV should matter but I thought I should mention this. After much tinkering I realized that the phone is sending two different streams instead of exactly mirroring the phone's own stream. I think this is the case because when I was playing with settings I noticed in some cases it would send a landscape view to the TV when the phone's own display was in portrait mode. There were a couple other things that indicated that this is the case.
The Fix:
Anyways using a third party app like Titanium back up you need to freeze almost everything, anything that is not essential to running the game of your choice; this includes things like Verizon bloatware, Samsung bloat ware, s voice, maps, Facebook etc. You also have to turn off things like wifi, GPS, sync, etc. I also enabled force GPU rendering in the developer settings. Make sure you don't have a live background running. I also overclocked my phone to the max with setCPU. Also if you use an app like nova launcher you can make a back up of your settings and app placements which you can restore to keep your icon placements. I realize this is not a very viable fix, but this seemed to work for me.
End Fix
It's a pain, but worth it if you want a portable retro game machine. Samsung or someone at XDA needs to look into fixing this because I am pretty sure it is a software related issue. I hope anyone who bought a MHL adapter and wanted to retro game finds this useful.
So with the guys who have good results where you ordering it from.
Sent from my SPH-L710 using xda app-developers app
Hey just an update for anyone having issues such as screen flashes and lag I did a little more research and found in Samsung documentation that when connected to hdmi the s3 disables the output when a text or phone call is received but this was not implemented. I found that the device still checks for phone use and texts when connected to mhl. I actually had random screen flashes at set intervals on my TV! I disabled the phone and sms and this seemed to stop the flashing and help with some lag. I also noticed if you restart the device with the MHL to hdmi cable inserted the connection is a tad better and it also fixes screen flashes. I wish the damn thing worked and I have already replaced the MHL to hdmi cable twice now, and the slight lag (noticable when gaming) seems to affect a lot of people. It could be a problem with the actual device and not the software which would suck
Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk 2
I just tested the 1080p video camera and was surprised to find that I can actually pause the recording, move to where I need to be, and continue to record so that when I am finish, I get one continous file. This is like analog or DV tape. If you stop the recording then you need a video editor to piece the footage together, not to mention that if you record 5 secs at a time and play it back on the pc, you get just that 5 secs and have to open the next file.
Now you can record for 5 secs, pause, recompose, start recording again, pause, etc... and you will have one continuous file. I wonder if the file size limit is 4gb if you format your external SD card to fat32.
Also, I have two Samsung SMART LED TV, one is 2010 C series and the other is a 2011 D series. If you have those, then you know about the allshare feature that allows you to send pics, music, video straight to your TV without the need for wire or that $99 Allshare Cast. Now while musics and pictures can be sent to the TV wirelessly without lag, 720p video can not. I couldn't do it with my EPIC 4G touch without experiencing buffer just like a youtube video is buffering. That is with both TVs so I figure it must be my slow network at home but I upgraded to Gigabit ethernet and that still doesn't help. I figure the problem is that the 720p video from the Epic 4G touch which is recorded at 17mbps is a bit too much to send over wifi to the TVs.
So I recorded some 1080p this morning. BTW, as long as you keep the camera still, the video is very sharp. Do a lot of panning and the camera has trouble focusing sharply. Stop and touch the screen to do selective focusing, like on a flowers that is not in the center of the screen. While the video bit rate remains at 17 mbps, the resulting video is very sharp on my 55 inch LED TVs. Almost as good as my Canon HFS10 but the details are much better on the Canon.
So I sent the 1080p video via allshare to my 2010 C series TV(which is hard wired to the router) and I still get buffering problem. So I figure the bit rate is too high to send over wifi. Then I went upstair and tested it with the 2011 D series TV and surprisingly, no buffering or lag. And the TV upstair is wirelessly connected to the router, not hard wired.
So I took a 24mbps 1080p video that I recorded on my Canon DSLR, which I transferred to my phone, and tried to play that using the built in allshare feature of the TV and my Galaxy Note 2. Surprise surprise, no stuttering or buffering either. No need to connect the MHL cable or remove the microSD card to play the videos on TV anymore.
Is it just my handset are are other people have horrible video playback it does not matter if it is from on the home video recorded through the phone camera or on sites such as hulu, you tube or even google movies all video playback is juddery and laggy does anybody have any answers or similar experiences with there handset. It is a T-mobile handset with the Snapdragon 600
Juddery ? I'm assuming you mean jittery or stuttering.
ajmpjm said:
Is it just my handset are are other people have horrible video playback it does not matter if it is from on the home video recorded through the phone camera or on sites such as hulu, you tube or even google movies all video playback is juddery and laggy does anybody have any answers or similar experiences with there handset. It is a T-mobile handset with the Snapdragon 600
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i had some lag with 720P and had to reboot the phone it worked good fore a few mins then did it again. i havent tried 1080p but i assume it would do the same since its even more higher def.
ZERO stuttering or pausing on the current CyanogenMod 10.1 build. Just tested it with YouTube.
Can not comment on stock software as I never tried it.
Everything else on the system works fine. 4k Video from Amazon Instant comes through quick and clear. Hulu is fine .. etc.
When watching Netflix, everything does fine for a while. There is a good quality 4K stream coming in that is playing smoothly. However after about 20-30 minutes of watching a show, the video starts to stutter and get choppy, eventually leading to the point where it is only display around 10 frames per second or so from what it looks like. Hitting back on the remote and starting the video again corrects the issue, however having to do this 4 to 5 times during a show seems ridiculous.
Is there anyone else that has had this issue and has found a solution for it ?
Thanks for the help anyone that can.
I have the same Problem with Netflix. So is Ultraflix at 5.0.5.1 with h.265 stuttering and works only with h.264 at 5.0.4 it works with both codecs perfect.
Hello,
I have tried several streaming sites and the video stutters on most of them. DC universe, sling, fubo all stutter but the audio is good.
YouTube, twitch and Disney+ all work fine.
Also, the video only seems to stutter on my phone and not if I cast to Chromecast.
Does anyone know a fix for this?
I am on Android 9.0 on a custom room. It worked good on the room I had previous, but I had to change for other reasons, I haven't changed anything, unsure of what it could be.