plex for android vs ios airvideo - Eee Pad Transformer General

In an atempt to watch some films stored on my 1TB box via local wifi, I have installed plex for android on my TF and a crappy atom 450 netbook. I also have a ipad 1 with airvideo on the ipad plus the netbook. firstly when my netbook is attached via usb to the HD box all the films are playable on the TF in any format all with sound and in the right aspect ratio, the problem is for any file over 1.5gig there is stopping and buffering, maybe due to the processor speed of the netbook. the difference on the ipad is totaly different. I have Inception at 720p and a file size of 3.5gig and it streams in high res with clear sound and picture on only 256mb ram.
As an avid android fan it pains me to say but im glad i also have a jailbroken ipad. At this stage of the game HC does not live up to what I had hoped an android tablet would be.
The negatives touted against a (rooted) ipad do not stack up, OK usb stick and sd card on an ipad but only if not powered so for files, photos etc, file browsing by ifile is easy, and flash is not an issue because its so flakey on the TF I use HTML5.
My general thoughts are the TF is a good netbook replacement and honeycomb is 75% there
the UI is way better than IOS, it just does not do what it says on the tin.
With a faster PC running the Flex server it is definatley the answer for all your movies no converting.
My only gripes with HC and maybe ASUS if they turn out to be TF related are flash, video performance in general and this awful unaceptable keyboard lag.
sort it out and I might sell my ipad

I agree with you that the TF sucks in handling flash and HD videos. However, bear in mind that the iPad has 1024x768 resolution, so it will not support 720p. Therefore, AirVideo is not nearly working as hard.

Looks like the bottle neck is your cpu and memory. I have a Intel Celeron E3300 and two GB of ram. I am able to stream 17-20GB blu ray rip from inside and outside my network with plex. The issue is that your computer has to transcode the video and audio before its sent it out to your TF. I noticed that on my E3300 clock at default 2.5 it was stuttering on files that were 6GB and higher. After overclocking it to 3.0 no issues. I dont know how airvideo works on the ipad but for plex it has to transcode the video/audio before it display on your TF.

It's probably down to how airvideo and plex actually encode the video stream...I do agree plex should give more options to allow better control of the codec itself..
you can also choose to encode all your movies files in handbreak using 720P High profile, they look great on the TF.

Can anyone tell me why Plex adds loads of compression when streaming videos? I've changed wi-fi to 5mb on my transformer but still compression everywhere. Maybe I'm missing something but there doesn't seem to be any transcoding settings on the PC client software. Playback looks so much better when playing the file from the internal memory on the transformer.
can anyone help please?

renegadeian123 said:
Can anyone tell me why Plex adds loads of compression when streaming videos? I've changed wi-fi to 5mb on my transformer but still compression everywhere. Maybe I'm missing something but there doesn't seem to be any transcoding settings on the PC client software. Playback looks so much better when playing the file from the internal memory on the transformer.
can anyone help please?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Which verison of plex are you using? Under verison 9.8.7 there a setting call less Color/more speed. Make sure this is not enable. I don't believe that verison 1.0 has this setting. I get compression when my wifi is set to auto. With 5mb enable the compression is gone.

I'm running version 1.0 on android.
I downloaded a different version of ffmpeg as per this thread -
http://forums.plexapp.com/index.php/topic/26531-playback-issues-potential-fix/page__st__20
This seems to have solved it somewhat, although still not perfect. It's strange as a 720p file plays fine but a normal avi is not quite there.

Related

Fyi - for movies use Rockplayer Universal, not Lite.

Just thought I would throw out that there is a huge difference in performance and stability on the Xoom when using Rockplayer Universal from the Rockplayer website versus Rockplayer Lite in the Market. Many(not all) of my playback issues have been solved. Hope this helps some people.
Link-
http://www.rockplayer.com/index_en.html
Sent from my Xoom using Tapatalk
What playback issues were you having that were resolved? Are you playing avi's or mkv files?? Tried h.264 high profile encoded videos in either 720p or 1080p?
Unfortunately no, it does not resolve the mkv issues. But the overall playback quality is much improved for me. Xvid files are playing much smoother. There is much less tiling and pixelation and improved audio quality.
Sent from my Xoom using Tapatalk
I have problems with Rockplayer freezing my Xoom when I play AVIs and change the scaling. However, if I leave it alone, it does play files that the stock video player doesn't.
I just tried playing an AVI and it seems to be playing just fine
Everyone is complaining about the high profile HD. It is sad something this powerful has a crazy limit or flaw but, In reality if you wanted to watch those are you really going to put that many movies on a micro SD card? Most of my TV shows and movies are avi. 10 hours of playback I want more to watch.
What I would have liked is a better way to stream from my nas. Sucks to have to copy over to watch something.
Sent from my Xoom using XDA App
thehavock18 said:
Everyone is complaining about the high profile HD. It is sad something this powerful has a crazy limit or flaw but, In reality if you wanted to watch those are you really going to put that many movies on a micro SD card? Most of my TV shows and movies are avi. 10 hours of playback I want more to watch.
What I would have liked is a better way to stream from my nas. Sucks to have to copy over to watch something.
Sent from my Xoom using XDA App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
In reality yes. I want to copy what I have available quickly to the SD card and walk out the door. With the HD high profile issue, I have to convert everything I want to watch on the Zoom before I can walk out the door. Just converted a 2 hour 720p MKV movie using Handbrake and it took one hour to complete. But it does look very nice and works properly.
Is there any tablet out there that you can just throw any high profile HD video and it will play flawlessly?
Let me check, one of the best tablet right now is iPad.
No, it cannot play high profile video:
http://www.zeropaid.com/news/87921/ipad-as-video-device-not-so-much/
The iPad can only play back video files in .mp4, .mpv, and .mov file formats with H.264 video at Main Profile level 3.1 with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps/48kHz. In other words, the iPad basically plays back video in the iTunes format and really nothing else.
So, I would not complaint much probably.
I know, there are some single core phones that can play high profile video.
But probably, Tegra 2 offers something else which those single core could not, for example: good battery life? Or ...?
keitht said:
In reality yes. I want to copy what I have available quickly to the SD card and walk out the door. With the HD high profile issue, I have to convert everything I want to watch on the Zoom before I can walk out the door. Just converted a 2 hour 720p MKV movie using Handbrake and it took one hour to complete. But it does look very nice and works properly.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
thehavock18 said:
Everyone is complaining about the high profile HD. It is sad something this powerful has a crazy limit or flaw but, In reality if you wanted to watch those are you really going to put that many movies on a micro SD card? Most of my TV shows and movies are avi. 10 hours of playback I want more to watch.
What I would have liked is a better way to stream from my nas. Sucks to have to copy over to watch something.
Sent from my Xoom using XDA App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Average 720P movie in high profile h.264 is under 5 GB. Xoom has 30gb free space. Also, don't forget tv shows in 720P which are around a GB for 42 minutes.
And don't forget that as soon as the Xoom is given CIFS support, it will be able, or should be able rather, to stream movies and whatever else off your network.
gogol said:
Is there any tablet out there that you can just throw any high profile HD video and it will play flawlessly?
Let me check, one of the best tablet right now is iPad.
No, it cannot play high profile video:
http://www.zeropaid.com/news/87921/ipad-as-video-device-not-so-much/
The iPad can only play back video files in .mp4, .mpv, and .mov file formats with H.264 video at Main Profile level 3.1 with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps/48kHz. In other words, the iPad basically plays back video in the iTunes format and really nothing else.
So, I would not complaint much probably.
I know, there are some single core phones that can play high profile video.
But probably, Tegra 2 offers something else which those single core could not, for example: good battery life? Or ...?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Uh, the Galaxy Tab running Froyo cranks out high profile like a boss. My Epic4g cranks out high profile like a boss.
gogol said:
Is there any tablet out there that you can just throw any high profile HD video and it will play flawlessly?
Let me check, one of the best tablet right now is iPad.
No, it cannot play high profile video:
http://www.zeropaid.com/news/87921/ipad-as-video-device-not-so-much/
The iPad can only play back video files in .mp4, .mpv, and .mov file formats with H.264 video at Main Profile level 3.1 with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps/48kHz. In other words, the iPad basically plays back video in the iTunes format and really nothing else.
So, I would not complaint much probably.
I know, there are some single core phones that can play high profile video.
But probably, Tegra 2 offers something else which those single core could not, for example: good battery life? Or ...?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
My Galaxy S phone plays them flawlessly. I guess my expectations were too high. I thought a dual core processor would be capable.
BS...
gogol said:
Is there any tablet out there that you can just throw any high profile HD video and it will play flawlessly?
Let me check, one of the best tablet right now is iPad.
No, it cannot play high profile video:
http://www.zeropaid.com/news/87921/ipad-as-video-device-not-so-much/
The iPad can only play back video files in .mp4, .mpv, and .mov file formats with H.264 video at Main Profile level 3.1 with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps/48kHz. In other words, the iPad basically plays back video in the iTunes format and really nothing else.
So, I would not complaint much probably.
I know, there are some single core phones that can play high profile video.
But probably, Tegra 2 offers something else which those single core could not, for example: good battery life? Or ...?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
My iPad looks amazingly smooth on high profile x264 files encoded by Handbrake. The XOOM chokes so badly on these files it looks like a bad slideshow. YOU ARE WRONG.

[Q] Streaming movies from my home-pc to phone over wifi

Hi,
I have a server(windows) at home where I store all my movies and music. From there I stream(using file-sharing) all those movies to the computers I use. Now I want to do this also on my phone, which is possible(seen in this topic: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=687163).
The problem lies with the following; Since a year or so I started only watching movies in 720p or more. Those formats are really big and even my i7 laptop with N wifi is having a hard time streaming those(some 1080p movie are not streamable). So this will definitly not work on my HD2, even with the new blazingly fast gingerbread rom
So I'm searching for a application that can re-encode the requested movie realtime to a smaller format(say 800 X 480) and stream it to my phone. Is there a solution like this?
Greetz Willem
I miss air video ( iphone ) on my hd2
Ever so slightly off-topic but...
I have an Archos Tablet (Model 101), which has a 1Ghz processor (so same as HD2), but a 10.1 inch screen. If I use QQPlayer (as I do on the HD2), my video jerks all over the place, but if I use the Archos video player (which is hardware enabled), even 3GB Blue-Ray rips work fine.
So I think it *may* be possible, if you can find a hardware-enabled video player. Whether this is possible on the HD2 I'm not sure, but I'll watch this thread with interest/try my own ideas when my phone is back from HTC.
smeddy said:
Ever so slightly off-topic but...
I have an Archos Tablet (Model 101), which has a 1Ghz processor (so same as HD2), but a 10.1 inch screen. If I use QQPlayer (as I do on the HD2), my video jerks all over the place, but if I use the Archos video player (which is hardware enabled), even 3GB Blue-Ray rips work fine.
So I think it *may* be possible, if you can find a hardware-enabled video player. Whether this is possible on the HD2 I'm not sure, but I'll watch this thread with interest/try my own ideas when my phone is back from HTC.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
A 3 gig blueray rip is not what i'm talking about, I'm talking about 10-20 gig full hd rips.
Ah, TVersity may be your best bet. Works through the web-browser and was reasonable quality over Wifi, although not perfect and probably not even up to DVD/Divx standard
orb maybe?
i doubt you will find anything to re-encode it real time over the wifi
which device does the processing in that case? the machine sending it or the device requesting the file?

[Q] Convert video for Iconia

Hi guys, it's about a week that i'm tring to create a flawlessy working HD video for the Iconia, i've tried a lot of config but no one works, so i tried with Up downloaded from iTunes and it works like a charm, with a very good quality in about 4GB with the native Honeycomb player. So i take my Tron Legacy BluRay and tried to create a MP4 with HandBrake with AppleTV 2 preset but when i play it with every player i've got on my tab (native, Mobo, VPlayer, RockPlayer, Vital and Nemo) it's like fast forwarding and i cant slow it down to normal speed. With MediaInfo i compare the downloaded Up m4a and my rip of Tron, they look the same (same ref frames, same b-frame and all) but the iTunes one works, mine not. Obviously on PC everything it's ok.
So guys, what do you use to convert your videos to playback on Iconia?
I took the advice from this post and was able to get a 720p conversion using Handbrake from a 1080p mp4 rip of Shaun of the Dead, using Loose Animorphic setting and 1280 Picture width. You have to go to the Advanced tab and set Maximum B-Frames to 0 (from default 2?) and Preferences/General/Output Files, uncheck "'Use iPod /iTunes friendly (.m4v) file extension for MP4'". Also a good idea to make sure the Audio's set to no more than 160kbps, I think that's the Honeycomb maximum audio rate for video files atm.
Oh, the 720p file ended up being ~2GB, looks good but not great picture (occasional blur artifacting on hard scene transitions.)
Thanks, did you use AppleTV preset?
I'm going to try with your settings (i thought i used the same, but probably i'm wrong), tomorrow morning i'm coming back to update.
I've been using this preset: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVBpeQNWbEQ and have had no problems
That preset works perfect.. Thanks!
I use normal and no b-frames and i got a playable videos but very choppy. I'm going to try that present, thanks Bootup.
I've used HandBrakeCLI under Linux to convert HD MKVs for use on my Iconia. It definitely works ok for 720p video but not yet tried any 1080p.
I've written a couple of scripts that convert a single mkv file and also a directory full of mkv files, they can be downloaded here: http://db.tt/Fq7knIr
Usage is simply: "mkv2iconia.sh inputfile.mkv" or just "bulkmkv2iconia.sh" for a full directory. They will both produce "inputfile.mp4" that can be played via hardware accelerated system player
Requirements: a linux command line, HandBrakeCLI, and a lot of time/patience.
Hope this is useful to someone.
Sent from my A500 using XDA Premium App
I'll give it a try if the preset posted before wont work for my rip of Tron Legacy.
I've been using a Windows application called DVD Catalyst 4 (tools4movies.com) to convert video. It had a lot of buzz about it on various forums, but I was skeptical. But it has a group of settings specifically for the Acer A500 (fast, HQ, 1080p) which make it easy to use and the new beta version works with DVDs or Blu-Rays (even copy protected ones if you have AnyDVD installed). I've done a few movies as tests and it seems to work very well.
And I was a user of Handbrake and RipBot264 previously.
I'm ripping a DVD now to try this process. It's getting good feedback,but I'll be able to decide for myself once I get it on tab. http://www.androidtablets.net/forum...rum/14292-ripping-videos-dvd-acer-solved.html
Update: Just transferred the movie onto my tab (Tangled @1.05 GB) and all I can say is wow!! You guys definitely must give this a try.
@DJ_Jedi
At the risk of sounding stupid, how are you using videos downloaded from iTunes on your Acer? I thought they were DRM protected.
Do all of your videos that you have encoded come out a bit choppy? Like skipping frames all the time.
butterflygirl said:
@DJ_Jedi
At the risk of sounding stupid, how are you using videos downloaded from iTunes on your Acer? I thought they were DRM protected.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I just take it, renamed to .mp4 and copy into my Movies folder, it said "Could not work, copy anyway?" i said yes and it works.
But great news guys, used the Xoom preset posted on the previous page and it works great! Picture quality it's not the best, a little bit lower than on my previous tries, but definitely good, i'm gonna try 2 ref frames and target size 4GB and not avg bitrate 3500.
i use rock player... it plays pretty much every video file
Here is a guide for ripping high quality DVD to a500. Read to the bottom, as video conversion is discussed as well.
http://www.androidtablets.net/forum...rum/14292-ripping-videos-dvd-acer-solved.html
EDIT: Woops, that was already posted above.
I have been using dvdvidesoft for our other android phones with the iPhone/I pad settimgs with no issues. I switched to it from handbrake because it was faster...,very user friendly and wasn't quite the resource hog handbrake was
saeba said:
I've been using a Windows application called DVD Catalyst 4 (tools4movies.com) to convert video. It had a lot of buzz about it on various forums, but I was skeptical. But it has a group of settings specifically for the Acer A500 (fast, HQ, 1080p) which make it easy to use and the new beta version works with DVDs or Blu-Rays (even copy protected ones if you have AnyDVD installed). I've done a few movies as tests and it seems to work very well.
And I was a user of Handbrake and RipBot264 previously.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Been using DVD Catalyst for a long time now. I usually rip in a Divx encoded AVI wrapper, but the Iconia Tab d/n support AVI files. So I did a couple rips using the Apple TV HQ HD settings and that is working peachy. I didn't realize it had a specific device profile for the Acer (doh!).
I like this tablet, but the poor media file format support will keep it from being my main entertainment portable go to device. That will remain my Archos 70IT (250GB) for the time being.
I think i'll stick to Handbrake + Xoom Preset downloaded from here, good quality and about 3 hours conversion with a 2.1 dual core mobile CPU, guess how much it takes with an i7, because i'm going to buy a new PC this summer and i'm waver between i7 2600 and new AMD's Bulldozer...
http://www.dvdvideosoft.com/free-dvd-video-software.htm
Converts in minutes
saeba said:
I've been using a Windows application called DVD Catalyst 4 (tools4movies.com) to convert video. It had a lot of buzz about it on various forums, but I was skeptical. But it has a group of settings specifically for the Acer A500 (fast, HQ, 1080p) which make it easy to use and the new beta version works with DVDs or Blu-Rays (even copy protected ones if you have AnyDVD installed). I've done a few movies as tests and it seems to work very well.
And I was a user of Handbrake and RipBot264 previously.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I don't know what version you have but my dvd cat 4 is a retail copy and i do not see anything on the a500 . I do see the xoom but thats it. No Iconia a500

My 5 cents

I was able to play a 2gb+ 720p flawlessly from my 4gb Kingston thumb drive. AVI using Moboplayer.
The Good
Gotta love widgets
Love the USB port
I did a little side-by-side with the StevePad...
Small font in a web page is easier to read than on iPad2 (my girlfriend's)
The back camera takes better pictures than iPad
The Bad
Picture colours are a little washed next to iPad
The cross-hatch pixel pattern can be seen on white backgrounds, not so much on the iPad
GUI still not as smooth as iPad...but close
The Ugly
GPS takes forever to lock - some workarounds
No ad-hoc networks allowed - but there's a fix for that
Activesync not supported, or OWA via native browser (or Dolphin) but Firefox works
I love the Iconia but Honeycomb could be a little more polished. Can't wait for updates cuz I want to keep this tab.
Hope the great developers here stick with this model for a bit.
EDIT: I traded my A500 in for another and no more cross-hatch pixel pattern!!
i had a 4GB or so mkv that a played from USB via mobiplayer. It made me use software to decode hence very choppy. 720p. Just a silly test to see what would happen. Love the USB.
As far as video codecs, all Tegra 2 devices are cursed with poor codec support, thus poor hardware acceleration support. Nvidia talks a lot of media smack, but does not support the chipset to back it up.

h.264 Encoder for Transformer/Tegra 2

I'm looking for an application which supports h.264 encoding on the Tegra 2. My desktop PC is just way too slow at re-encoding and the fans get too loud to leave it running over night.... so I thought I might do my re-encodes on the TF itself, but so far I haven't found an application which supports this. Does anyone know if there is one?
I haven't seen one but I have the feeling it would be horribily slow...
leonpr said:
I haven't seen one but I have the feeling it would be horribily slow...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This is Obviously going to be slower than realtime, otherwise you'd play the movie smoothly without the need to reencode.
Not sure why you would think the TF with a 1Ghz mobile chip and 1G ram would be faster than a desktop, unless your desktop is very old.
GetLaid said:
I'm looking for an application which supports h.264 encoding on the Tegra 2. My desktop PC is just way too slow at re-encoding and the fans get too loud to leave it running over night.... so I thought I might do my re-encodes on the TF itself, but so far I haven't found an application which supports this. Does anyone know if there is one?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
unless your PC is more than 5 years old, there is a good chance it will still encode h264 faster than the TF...
what numbers in fps you are getting if you use handbrake to encode H264 720p in High Profile? I have a rather beefy desktop with i5 2600k and it encodes about 65-70 fps, and my old dell laptop with T7200 runs about just over 20fps
I have a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 with 1GB RAM. From what I've tried so far my encoding speed hovers between 1-5 fps. So yeah, encoding on the Transformer can't be that much worse, and I wouldn't have to deal with roaring fans.
Tegra2 probably supports hardware encoding of h264 (for the camera for example) but apps won't have access to that unfortunately.

Categories

Resources