Playback Anomalies - Nexus 9 Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting

After playing for several hours, long files and long playlist playback regularly gets borked for audio files in any player and for video in the YouTube app. This has happened ever since I got my first Nexus 9, and on all operating systems I've installed since.
Originally, on Lollipop and Marshmallow, audio playback would slow down, like a vinyl record being played too slow.
Nowadays, on Nougat variants, playback speeds up, appearing to skip frames.
A key trigger for this playback deformation seems to be prolonged playback, as in it happens with long files and long playlists which have been playing for several hours.
I'm not sure about the scope of media that's affected by this. I have experienced this with audio files on a near daily basis and it happens with YouTube video as well. I remember it happening with video files in other media players too, in the past, but I am not sure whether that is still an issue as I am watching fewer video files in media player apps these days.
(This has happened for years on two separate Nexus 9 tablets, running Lollipop, Marshmallow, Nougat, CyanogenMod and LineageOS.)

I haven't had any problems with video playback. Usually up to 4.5 hours of video per day. Video files stored locally on device (and sometimes on USB stick via otg) playing with either mxplayer or VLC. Haven't seen slow down or speed up. I don't use YouTube much though so I don't have any feedback there.
Running custom ROMs (since stock is pretty much useless). Dirty unicorns until they stopped development. Then purenexus, slim, and currently aicp.

I'm not sure what the issue is, but it happened from day one and on two separate devices running different OS'ses -- currently stock Nougat and LineageOS.

Related

[Q] Issues with recorded videos over DLNA/Allshare

I've searched thoroughly on this and no solutions, only a few other users reporting the same problem.
Got a TV, Blu-ray player, or network media player that supports DLNA? Can you record a video on your Vibrant, and successfully play it on your client device? I think I saw someone say they had success using a WD Live HD Plus...but I'd sure like to get confirmation before I go get one.
I picked up a Samsung BD-C6900 player that ought to do this. Getting the networking set up on both the phone and the blu-ray went extremely smoothly. The Avatar trailer plays over DLNA perfectly. But videos recorded with the phone's camera? No go. They play for a second or two, then freeze, then sometimes pick up again, much farther into the clip, then freeze again. Even on the smallest resolution.
The C6900 is going back, unless I get some satisfaction from level three support in the morning...by the time I got that far tonight, the department had closed for the day.
So maybe I try the WD, or wait until some future time when Samsung finally gets around to doing the engineering that should have been done before releasing product, and spreading hype about Allshare that crosses the fine line from fraud into marketing.
Any other experiences or ideas?
---
Update 10/1/2010 5PM MT:
Amie at level 3 support did not have any solutions, but was conscientious in taking down the data to relay to development.
I discovered that turning off "record audio" results in videos that play through allshare correctly, excepting the highest resolution mode. Even though they play correctly, there is a notice at the beginning: "Audio codec not support". This notice also sometimes briefly appears at the start of the malfunctioning videos that do contain audio.
I've copied the videos over to Ubuntu and used mplayer -identify to start analyzing them. Nothing jumps out as suspicious. In both cases, the audio format ID is 255 and mplayer selects the FAAD AAC codec. Mplayer plays them all fine.
I tried Twonky Mobile Server in addition to allshare, and it behaved similarly to allshare. It produced a log file in which the most interesting difference between avatar_trailer and the recorded videos is that DLNA profiles were found for the malfunctioning videos, but no profile was found for the Avatar trailer.
I wonder if something is triggering on-the-fly transcoding to happen, even though it should not be needed? On-the-fly transcoding is something that can happen under DLNA, so that broader compatibility can be achieved. It's going to be slow, though, on these embedded processors. Slowness due to transcoding would be consistent with the symptoms. I don't know whether such transcoding would happen on the server end (phone in this case), or the client end. Anyone, anyone? Bueller?
My next experiment will be to burn the videos to disc and see what the C6900 does with them in that case.
Update 10/1/2010 10PM MT: All the videos play fine when burned to disc. So it's purely an allshare issue...but is it on the phone end, or the BD player end? I checked back and found the source of the report that the WD Live worked with DLNA from a Vibrant...but it was not claimed that videos recored using the Vibrant's camera worked. So I have never seen any report of anyone ever playing their Vibrant-recorded videos using DLNA/allshare. Seems like something amiss on the phone end, then...but why, if the video files themselves are OK, do two different DLNA server apps (allshare and Twonky) both fail in the same way?
Next experiment: stream to Windows 7 as the DLNA client.
I would like to capture the DLNA streams, but am not sure how to go about that.
Mods: I see you moved this to Q&A. I think perhaps it would be a better fit in Development, now?
Tried flashing a different ROM, Frankin-Twiz Final. It has allshare removed. TwonkyServer Mobile had Unrecoverable Error on startup. So I restored to stock.
(someone has since posted a dlna.apk in that thread that restores allshare)
I had to reinstall Twonky after flashing back to stock, and after that, it worked better! There must have been an update to it in the interim...
Still not perfect; there are pauses every few seconds, but it resumes from the right spot.
My best guess is that an on-the-fly transcode is happening due to the unusual 32k audio sample rate of the camcorder videos. The client device probably doesn't support that rate over dlna. I bet some client devices do, and would play the videos smoothly.
Hopefully a firmware update for the BD-C6900 player will come along that fixes it.
I acquired a Western Digital Live Plus HD player at Best Buy for $99. With the Vibrant running TwonkyServer Mobile, the WD plays all videos perfectly, even 720p!
I didn't try allshare--no reason to bother, and I like how Twonky stays running in the background and lets you do other things on the phone.
The C6900 is boxed up ready to go back to the store.

[Q] RUNNING UnNamed Rom v1.3.0 on i777-Video playback Problem

I'm currently running my phone SGH i777 on Unnamed rom v1.3.0, i'm experiencing some problems on video playback on my current rom. The video stutters while playing less than even a second but happens quiet constantly on the phone. I wanted to know is the problem with the hardware of the phone or does the problem exist on this rom.?
pranavvm1992 said:
I'm currently running my phone SGH i777 on Unnamed rom v1.3.0, i'm experiencing some problems on video playback on my current rom. The video stutters while playing less than even a second but happens quiet constantly on the phone. I wanted to know is the problem with the hardware of the phone or does the problem exist on this rom.?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
No problems here - but it depends on the video. Video that uses certain features that are part of H.264 High Profile can do weird things.
I am on UnNamed 1.3.1 and hadn't tried video playback since I installed so I pulled up Mobo player and tried some movies on my SD card. Movies with dolby digital and two channel AAC would sometimes close as soon as they started although they would play after I tried a few times. Video without dolby digital seemed to play first time. I looked at the Mobo options and turned on "soft decoding". I haven't got a close since then. Video playback is very smooth (32GB class 10 uSD card). My videos were encoded in Handbrake as H.264 using the AppleTV2 setting. I only use AAC for movies that don't have much of a soundtrack.
These were videos .mp4 that i downloaded using tubemate and played them on my phone..In software decoding mode the're working fine in HW dec mode stutter while playing, so does that mean that the default video player on this rom is unable to play back these videos with the support of the hardware..?

ROM with HW accel? VEGAn7.1 wont run my mpeg4's

I used the latest VEGAn-ge-7.1.0 for the 1.2 bootloader on my gTab with CWM the other day. First time ever flashing a rom and everything went great! The problem I'm having is that the built-in video player in VEGAn will no longer play my mpeg4 movies/TV shows. With the stock ROM on the gTab I never had any problems with the built-in videoplayer OR mVideoplayer. They both worked just fine. Once I flashed VEGAn my movies wont work.
I can only assume it has something to do with hardware acceleration.?.?.?.? I have over 5tb worth of movies and tv shows already ripped from my collection, I will NOT re-encode anything at this point!
99% of what I use my gTablet for is watching movies while I'm at work(I'm on call with lots of down time) I would love to use a better ROM then the crappy TnT stuff Viewsonic shipped this thing with. But I cant NOT be able to play my mpeg4 movie files.
Is there a good ROM that will let my mpeg4's work like the stock ROM does? I dont care about any fancy features or anything in the ROM, I only watch movies on this thing and play the occasional game. But if I had a better ROM I'm sure I'd use this thing for more then what I do now.
My mpeg4 encode settings used in DVDFab are as follows:
848x480 resolution
3000kbps fixed bitrate(less then this movies can get pixelated)
128bit DolbyPrologic2 audio
FastEncoding 1 pass
These are the best settings for mpeg4's that I have found while testing out various settings when I bought the gTab. From the looks of the settings could it be that I need HW accel video playback instead of SW?
Any of the Froyo based roms such as Beastly-Clemsyn (my favorite, very fast and stable), Frankentab, BC, etc all have working hardware acceleration, as does the new ICS beta. You are probably right about the hardware accel. being the problem, this is the same reason I always end up back on a Froyo rom. I have encoded a lot of video that I stream from my main PC, and there is almost always skips, freezes or audio sync problems on roms w/o hardware acceleration.
You can also try on your current rom, MXPlayer and Mobo Player have versions that are optimized for ARM v7 (Gtablet). In the players settings, change from hardware to software video and audio decoding. Most of my videos play alright with MXPlayer on software decoding using CM7, which doesn't have hardware acceleration.
Last, you could try Qloud Media, if you have a pretty fast PC. Qloud will re-encode and stream your video from the PC, optimized for the target device. It works very well on every device I have tried it on, and can even work beyond your network, but it consumes my entire 4 CPU cores in bursts of a few seconds while it is re-encoding, so no intense PC usage while it is running.
Thank you! I'll try and stick with the Froyo based ROM's. I've DL'd quite a few different ROM's but I have yet to install any of them other then the latest VEGAn one.

VIdeo/ audio playback pauses for no reason

Hi xda!
I have a weird question that i haven't been able to find the answer for so I thought I'd ask here. I have a Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge, SM-925V, android version 5.0.2, rooted with stock rom. I have had this phone for at least 2 months and this problem just started happening:
My phone randomly pauses video and audio for no reason. For example I was watching Netflix last night in bed with nothing touching the screen. The phone's just sitting there and pauses playback. This is not a streaming issue,
This is what I've figured out so far:
1) I didn't touch the edges to accidently pause playback. The phone was just sitting there with nothing around its edges. Also, since it pauses audio playback while the screen is off, it can't be that
2) It's not a streaming issue, since it also has the same effect with locally stored videos and audio, like MX Player, and it also pauses audio playback on Mort Audio Book Player and Play Music when the screen is off.
3) The only apps I recently installed were Reddit and Imgur apps, can't see how they'd cause a conflict. I have also not updated my phone after which it would have started causing these errors.
Does anyone have any ideas?
hedniskhjartad said:
Hi xda!
I have a weird question that i haven't been able to find the answer for so I thought I'd ask here. I have a Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge, SM-925V, android version 5.0.2, rooted with stock rom. I have had this phone for at least 2 months and this problem just started happening:
My phone randomly pauses video and audio for no reason. For example I was watching Netflix last night in bed with nothing touching the screen. The phone's just sitting there and pauses playback. This is not a streaming issue,
This is what I've figured out so far:
1) I didn't touch the edges to accidently pause playback. The phone was just sitting there with nothing around its edges. Also, since it pauses audio playback while the screen is off, it can't be that
2) It's not a streaming issue, since it also has the same effect with locally stored videos and audio, like MX Player, and it also pauses audio playback on Mort Audio Book Player and Play Music when the screen is off.
3) The only apps I recently installed were Reddit and Imgur apps, can't see how they'd cause a conflict. I have also not updated my phone after which it would have started causing these errors.
Does anyone have any ideas?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You could perform a bug report and a log cat. Both of those could give you clues as to what could be going on. Just make sure you don't share the bug report.

Video playback stutter on Nougat

I'm unable to get a smooth video playback experience from my XTZ on any of the Nougat ROMs I have tried (LineageOS, crDroid, AOSP-CAF). Video streaming has some quite significant stuttering regardless of source (Netflix, Youtube) and playing local files has the same problem regardless of player app (LineageOS default video player, MX Player). Considering that Netflix streams on this device are not even HD, there should be easily enough processing power to play them without any stutter. Also, I do not recall having these problems on the 5.1.1 stock ROM.
I have already tried clean flashing several different nightlies of the official LineageOS as well as a couple of different unofficial builds of crDroid / AOSP-CAF. All of these produced the same results.
Right below are links to small video files which demonstrate the problem using a simple animation. The three white bars should be moving smoothly from right to left (as they do when I play the video on my PC). Instead, on my XTZ the bars "twitch" or "jump" all the time as if there are frames being dropped or something. The 30fps version should be the smoothest since this device has a 60Hz refresh rate. I would appreciate if someone could test this on 5.1.1 Stock and/or Nougat.
Motion_1080p_23.976fps_High_L4.mp4
Motion_1080p_24fps_High_L4.mp4
Motion_1080p_25fps_High_L4.mp4
Motion_1080p_30fps_High_L4.mp4
BTW, I am not the original author of this animation. I found it as an m2ts file on some other forum and then made the different frame rate versions to mp4 which the default Android players can handle.
For video streaming, i still recommend stock ROM, though it is quite old.

Categories

Resources