After searching around about the Imageon coprocessor on the TyTN, I decided to experiment a little. If the TyTN can do .mp4 and .m4a files in hardware, I converted some audio files over to .m4a and see if there was any performance improvement (in Windows Media Player). And there definitely was! General device usage was very quick while playing; I couldn't even notice a difference with or without playing. So, I converted all my music over to .m4a's.
However, the story doesn't end here. My testing was using just the onboard speaker. When I got on the train for my commute to work, I started up my A2DP headset to listen to some tunes. Funny thing, though. They started playing through the onboard speaker! I could hear device sounds through the bluetooth, and if I played an mp3 or a wma, I could hear it through the headset too. But no go on the .m4a/.mp4 over A2DP. No matter what I did, it wouldn't play through anything but the onboard speaker (or wired headset, of course).
Thinking about this, it actually makes sense. If the playback is hardware accelerated, it's probably not designed to go through an A2DP process, which is complete software. The Imageon chip probably passes decoded sound and video directly to the hardware speaker, without going through a software sublayer. I imagine this is by design, as it keeps performance pretty high. MP3's and WMA's are decoded in software without the imageon, so it processes like any other windows sound, and can go through A2DP.
So, there's a bit of a tradeoff here. Do I give up A2DP and all the AVRCP goodness I've come to love at the cost of performance, or do I live with the performance hit of WMAs? Admittedly, audio was ok before, but i've never been happy with the video performance of the TyTN with WMVs. With MP4s, though, it works great. Hmm...decisions, decisions.
Oh, and I've tried TCPMP too. It plays through A2DP, but with the same slowdown. I suspect this is because it doesn't know how to use the Imageon correctly, and is decoding in software too.
cjohnson6965 said:
After searching around about the Imageon coprocessor on the TyTN, I decided to experiment a little. If the TyTN can do .mp4 and .m4a files in hardware, I converted some audio files over to .m4a and see if there was any performance improvement (in Windows Media Player). And there definitely was! General device usage was very quick while playing; I couldn't even notice a difference with or without playing. So, I converted all my music over to .m4a's.
However, the story doesn't end here. My testing was using just the onboard speaker. When I got on the train for my commute to work, I started up my A2DP headset to listen to some tunes. Funny thing, though. They started playing through the onboard speaker! I could hear device sounds through the bluetooth, and if I played an mp3 or a wma, I could hear it through the headset too. But no go on the .m4a/.mp4 over A2DP. No matter what I did, it wouldn't play through anything but the onboard speaker (or wired headset, of course).
Thinking about this, it actually makes sense. If the playback is hardware accelerated, it's probably not designed to go through an A2DP process, which is complete software. The Imageon chip probably passes decoded sound and video directly to the hardware speaker, without going through a software sublayer. I imagine this is by design, as it keeps performance pretty high. MP3's and WMA's are decoded in software without the imageon, so it processes like any other windows sound, and can go through A2DP.
So, there's a bit of a tradeoff here. Do I give up A2DP and all the AVRCP goodness I've come to love at the cost of performance, or do I live with the performance hit of WMAs? Admittedly, audio was ok before, but i've never been happy with the video performance of the TyTN with WMVs. With MP4s, though, it works great. Hmm...decisions, decisions.
Oh, and I've tried TCPMP too. It plays through A2DP, but with the same slowdown. I suspect this is because it doesn't know how to use the Imageon correctly, and is decoding in software too.
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Very interesting post and findings. You may find the upcoming Coreplayer 1.0 from the devlopers of TCPMP and Betaplayer of interset to you, as they will be processing everything through software only and claim that they will be releasing the best multi- platform media player ever released: WM, Symbian, Palm etc, XP/Vista Desktop player and Mac Osx. I think you get my meaning. But I for one am looking forward to this as the Imageon 2282 Co-processor is limited in support for various fileformats anyway, and now with your findings, it appears the benefits of it hardware accelerated media cannot be enjoyed over A2DP...man this sucks!!
Anyway, check out this link & hopefully everything will look much brighter in the near future:
http://www.corecodec.com/forum/index.php?topic=3193.50
http://www.aximsite.com/boards/showthread.php?t=139390
Interesting app...I'll definitely be looking forward to it. In the meantime, I found kind of a half-assed solution that works ok for me. I use the wired headset (spliced so I can use real headphones, of course) and I'm using my Itech clip. I pair it up with the Tytn, and AVRCP works within windows media player! So, I get the hardware benefit of the Imageon, and the AVRCP to pause, go forward and backward. Volume even works too! Certainly not the absolute optimum, but it was never the wires that bothered me so much. Works great for me!
Glad u found a workaround. Still, bloody ridiculous that we have to physically adapt things on what is supposed to be cutting edge technology!!
mackaby007 said:
Glad u found a workaround. Still, bloody ridiculous that we have to physically adapt things on what is supposed to be cutting edge technology!!
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BTW, with an alternate player (if you only need audio), you can have full AVRCP support without cables. (TCPMP isn't compatible with WM5 it seems; some other players are).
I've written a complete article on this at http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=279459 ; it contains a LOT of never-before-published tips and tricks, AVRCP -wise.
Well, doesn't this thread just solve the "Why does WMP play some music out the speaker" question! Thanks, this was very aggravating to me. Most of my music is mp4a (AAC) encoded so I thought that it was a global bug (WMP won't stream music over A2DP). Imagine my surprise when I fired up an mp3 and the damn thing worked
Monday, this might all be moot, however, if CorePlayer actually can do AVRCP. I'm hoping this will be the case since Picard and I exchanged emails on AVRCP back in June. I pointed him to the mortplayer thread and hopefully he did some successful lurking there...
In a way though, CorePlayer will be a bit of a disappointment because their out-of-the-gate solution to the ATI Imageon dhilema will be "no Imageon support". ATI based acceleration is quite impressive when it actually works.
you think ati would bother with coding a player for support, they have the source code after all ,kinda like macromedia with their flash player for ppc, I don't get why they don't benefit from making a player and selling it, instead we're left with 3'rd party players from under developed companies.
Playing with the hardware acceleration has got me thinking, and I'm going to try some experimenting. As you know, mp4 is just a container format, and can house different video/audio codecs. I'm curious as to what exactly has been implemented. LE-AAC seems supported, but I'm going to try to convert some to HE-AAC and see if that has an effect on processor. With video, mpeg4 is probably supported, but what about h.264? I use my TyTN as kind of a PMP, so I'd like to get the best quality I can get out of it.
I'll start some experimenting tonight (watching CPU load on the TyTN) and post my results here!
tcpmp works fine on my universal so is compatable with wm05
Ok, Mpeg4 is definitely hardware accelerated, and h.264 is flat out not supported. A h.264 file encoded as an mp4 wouldn't play in windows media player. The .mp4 files take a while to load up (15-20sec or so), but once they do I could play at full speed, and jump around to any poing within the video with no slowdown. I encoded up to 768k video/128k audio. The higher bitrate I used, the longer it took to load up, but once they were loaded they played flawlessly.
AAC is a little different. If you've read up on types of AAC encoding, there's LE-AAC and HE-AAC. HE is the later standard, and gets better compression at similar bitrates. It's also backward compatible, so LE-AAC players can still play HE-AAC players, but it can't interpret the higher efficiency algorithm and quality is reduced. I can say with some confidence that the player only supports LE-AAC. Both types of files played, but the quality of HE-AAC files (both encoded at the same bitrate) was definitely reduced.
Now, with a proper version of Coreplayer that supports the Imageon, some interesting possibilities open up. The imageon chip does support h.264, and HE-AAC isn't much different either. Once we get version 1.1, or whatever, then we should be able to get the holy grail of Imageon acceleration in most codecs, plus the benefit of bluetooth A2DP streaming. I believe this will make the device much more usable during A2DP, as the only thing the CPU will have to do is A2DP; audio decoding will be left to the Imageon. I hope they can get this to work soon!
I hope I can get the video to forward/rewind/ fullscreen /back without going haywire soon
Hi, I have been looking for a discussions on HE-AAC in this forum for months and finally found yours! To bad though, it is on the Tytn, I am using the good old wizard and HE-AAC is playing well via TCPMP(with the AAC plugin), so well that I converted all my CDs to HE-AAC(in m4a containers).
Just some questions for you:
1) When playing in WMP, are the songs(in LE-AAC) playing in stereo? From what I know and experience, the songs only play in mono in the wizard... So, has the hardware acceleration in the Tytn enable playing in stereo? Cool!!
2) I encode my songs at 16kbps(HE-AAC) though and they are great but all the effort seems to be wasted as I cannot really use A2DP on the wizard as the codecs that I use(be it mp3 or HE-AAC) plays with distortion. The only solution I have now is to use MSI Blueplayer which gives superb quality via bluetooth BUT only MP3s, which I have "happily" dumped a few months ago... sigh...
BTW, is the bta2dp.dll on the Tytn the same files as the used for the Tornado hack?
This just on a select group of my videos, but a few of them don't have audio working in the stock video player and Act I. The video goes, but not the audio.
In Rockstar Player, the suspect videos played just fine.
Any reason why this might have happened and how to fix it?
my guess is that the suspect videos are coded in 5.1 or 6.1 surround. The stock media player doesn't support this. You could demux the audio to 2 channel and they will probably play fine.
I thought about this. It shows it as 2 channels, so that can't be it.
The audio bit rate could be out of range for the internal decoder. Try checking that. Other than that, I dunno.
Hi!
I have the samsung galaxy s, and i've got a question about the phones audio formats..
I was going to watch the movie Inception on my phone. The movie's format was: 720p H264 AAC.. The picture on the phone was very good, but i didn't get any sound from the phone. I read a bit about it and i found out that AAC was not a supported format.
So, does anybody have some audio converter program i can use, or other suggestions?
That would be great!
My SGS plays AAC and even mkv`s with DTS audio, it might be a ROM problem what you got there.
I encoded a film the other day and started watching it on the train today, but it would only play on fast forward!
Guessing the encoding is messed up or something, anyone seen this happen before?
I had this happen with some of the movies I encoded. For me I finally found that the reason was oddly enough due to the audio encoding. Somehow I had accidentally changed the setting to be 5.1 instead of stereo. Unfortunately I did about 7 or 8 movies with it like that before I tried one out and realized what had happened.
Interesting! Everything I've been encoding is 5.1, however with this particular video I increased the audio bitrate. I figured the default FFMPEG AAC setting of 64 Kbit might be a bit low for a movie, so increased it. (Previously I've just been encoding South Park episodes, which hardly require high audio bitrate).
My plan was to maintain 5.1 and convert all my mkv movies to mp4, as it not only reduces the file sizes a fair but, but also plays on Windows without any codec pack.
I guess I need to experiment with some different audio bitrates, or drop to stereo.
Thanks for the info!
good to know, as i just ordered a xoom today
and will be encoding a bunch of movies for it