yashsingh1/xdaforums huggingface dataset:
[Eee Pad Transformer General] WheresWaldo:
So let me just say that I dislike Handbrake simply because it is too slow and the presets tend to create larger files than necessary. But I did play with the presets supplied in the first post and actually re-encoded some straight from Bluray movies. If anyone says they don't have stuttering in their videos then I would suggest a trip to the optometrist. There is no way that a stock TF would play those without stuttering on any TF. We are talking about 3.1 here not the release OS with the stock kernel! Or maybe your source isn't HD.

Everything I have tried was re-encoded direct from the BR rip, using Base 3.0 profile, so I wasn't transcoding something already re-encoded. Everything stored in an MP4 container muxed using mp4box. Tried video alone with perfect playback then muxed in mp3, result = stuttering. Muxed AC3, result = stuttering. Muxed in AAC-LC, result = stuttering. Even muxed OGG and guess what, it stuttered, of course the default player wouldn't play the file but Moboplayer would.

At this point I do not believe any of the "successes" listed here really are looking at video streams without compression artifacts, if they are claiming that theirs play perfect. I challenge any one of the "perfect playable" files be placed where some of us without success can access them to see if they are really watchable.

If it wasn't for the frank discussion about what doesn't work I would have downgraded my rating of this thread to 1 or 2 stars as the presets simply don't work if you actually want to hear the dialog as well as watch the video. I would also suggest that this thread be stickied with perhaps a title change as the Handbrake presets supplied are simply guesses and should only be used as a starting point and not the definitive answer to playing high quality video on your TF.

Please note that I am not talking about Flash videos or HTML5 videos streaming from the web, This is about HD video accessed from a local file on the TF.

One more note, I don't think this is really a TF issue but most likely a Tegra-2 issue. I am not sure who is writing the sound codecs for all these boards but someone (ASUS or NVIDIA) needs to step up here and rewrite the ones we have as I still believe that is where most of the issues lie.

Note: Sorry about the long rant, but I am banging my head against the wall trying to find the right parameters that will result in my definition of acceptable playback.
[Eee Pad Transformer General] leonpr:
Hmmm so you read 9 pages of mainly success and your 1 experiance is OMG YOUR ALL BLIND AND IT DOESNT WORK!?! THIS THREAD IS USELESS

Ive re-encoded 3 films (1x 32gb file I basically ripped using MakeMKV to do a straight BR rip, 1x 14gb 1080p 'downloaded' movie and 1x 9gb 720p 'downloaded' movie) and all 3 have played fine for me when I was running on stock 3.1 and guys at work watched as well - even skipping through didnt cause artifacts.

But like computers none 2 are the same and you might just be unlucky? Its not a good answer but its all I can think of. Might be worth you rooted and overclocking to see if there is any change?
[Eee Pad Transformer General] WheresWaldo:
I have sent you a PM.

To be really honest there isn't 9 pages of success stories, there are many that don't see it besides myself. Am am still looking for a playable HD file, are you volunteering to supply the one you used?

So if you have some success, list exactly what the source was, what you used to re-encode, including all parameters, and I will try to duplicate your results. On your straight rip what audio was muxed with the video stream? Your 720p re-encode was done using what encoder? Again, what audio stream did you use? If you don't want to post the sources here you can PM me and we can take this discussion offline. I am willing to be civil about it as I think others would benefit from a candid discussion, I won't resort to YELLING!

Don't forget that quality is subjective and maybe what you see as acceptable might not be for others.

Artifacts aren't caused by skipping through the file, but rather using too much compression in the encoding process. I usually don't skip around when I am watching something so a bit of blocking until the data rate settles is not what I am talking about here.

I am already rooted, but until Asus releases source I will refrain from using the current, and only overclocked kernel.
[Eee Pad Transformer General] sontin:
Someone should check youtube HD videos. I'm used tubemate to download them and i never really saw a problem with these videos. So maybe it's help to see which audio codec must use.
[Eee Pad Transformer General] leonpr:
That is fair enough, sorry if i came off as an ass (wow only a week on this forum and the amount of angry posts must be getting to me :P) - I'll dig up the information on the rips over the weekend as I'm not home much at the moment. For the non-specifics on the re-code used the one from the OP imported into Handbreak and changing the resolution to 1280x - I did play with some of the setting on the first couple but to be honest they didn't come out any good so just stuck with standard.

Its not worth downloading at 14GB+ film each to test but how about we find something short and sweet (a HD TV ep) and use that for some playing to see what we can get out of it... as you said lets take it offline and over the weekend see what we can come up with, I'm happy to go back to stock kernal but would rather not flash the rom back but hey its close enough :)

I'll PM you tomorrow while I'm at work :)
[Eee Pad Transformer General] leonpr:
On a non-handbrake but video note I'm quite impressed with the recode on stream that Plex is doing. On the wifi at home its streaming nicely (and looking good) and it does work remotely however my internets 700k upload is stopping any sort of quality stream... other issue is that my media server isn't powerful enough to recode the high quality stuff on the fly so I have to run it on my i5.
[Eee Pad Transformer General] buri73:
You can take a look at my samples in OP and see if that is acceptable for you. Truth is, I think Tegra2 may not be capable of perfect HD playback. But it could certainly be acceptable to someone. People have mentioned micro judder on panning scenes. I think I see it too if I really pay attention to it. Is it really noticeable? To me it is not. If you ask me if TF is capable of perfect HD playback, I will tell you no, but is it watchable? It certainly is.

The source I used for the sample was a 1080i TS using the presets posted. High@L3.1 with AAC audio. Acceptable quality using default player and Mobo (HW).
[Eee Pad Transformer General] dragonthl:
Thanks, really helpful.

Hope some more update will help TF watch mkv 720p directly without convert, now im really disappoint with this.

My SGS II play any kind of video without lag :(
[Eee Pad Transformer General] WheresWaldo:
I found tubemate (Google has removed it from the market but you can still download it direct from the author http://tubemate.net). I downloaded the Red Riding Hood trailer in both 720p and 1080p. The file is awfully small for good quality video, and it appears a bit fuzzy when you watch it YouTube must re-encode for their site as the same trailer from Apple Movie Trailers is 4x larger. Regardless playing the 1080p file locally results in obvious stuttering, the 720p file plays better but there is still a bit of stuttering on scenes that pan, especially if it's up and down. I will pull the file off the TF and extract the streams to see what they did.

Update: So the files downloaded by tubemate are pretty much lo-res, even at 1080p. It was obvious from the file sizes that the video quality would be sub-par. This is likely why YouTube videos appear to play smoothly. I would never encode to the level of video quality used in those clips. Even with the low quality video 1080p is choppy and 720p plays smoothly. Just for reference the mp4 file for the 2:36 clip was just over 17MB while the same file from Apple was 70+MB.
[Eee Pad Transformer General] WheresWaldo:
The above statement is what I think I was frustrated with, as all the success stories may be exhibiting the same behavior. Please buri, I am not picking on you, you just wrote what I believe is reality for TF users.

My problem is that if I am going to the trouble to encode the video to specific resolution and compression I want it to be smooth, is that too much to ask? It's not the time either, with a quad-core i7 running @ 3.2 Ghz can encode a 100 minute BR rip down to 720p in about 2 hours start to finish. So if we have to go to the trouble of setting up the encode can't we find out what the Tegra-2 can really do to provide smooth playback!

I wouldn't have even started this back and forth if good enough was good enough. I want it to be better than good enough, and I think others would appreciate that also.

I could compare it to my Captivate but really it's not the same, although I use the same quality settings and the same audio, I do encode to a much lower resolution. So there are just less pixels to push to the screen, it should be smoother. But my Captivate is single core and not touted as a multimedia device like the Tegra-2 equipped devices are. So I say let's find a set of parameters that will work most of the time, not just some of the time.
[Eee Pad Transformer General] buri73:
My major problem with Tegra2 device in general was Nvidia's lack of support. They have never clearly stated what the capabilities of their SOC is. What you have to understand is we are using a cutting edge device for the time being with somewhat shaky new OS. Up until recent 3.1 update, high profile was not even a possibility. I was very disappointed at the fact that my dual-core, cutting edge device could not handle a 720p mkv that my phone can play back flawlessly. It's doesn't matter what the display resolution is, it takes the same amount of CPU/GPU power to decode a video at given resolution. Pre-HC devices with non Tegra SOC has better software support. Samsung for their Galaxy S devices had a lot of time working on video/audio codecs. So I guess only time will tell if Nvidia/HC will get better. Meanwhile, I have accepted Tegra2 devices as what they are. With almost every tablet manufacturer jumping on Tegra2, I guess you will have to pick your own poison. If it doesn't get better with time, I will be jumping ship as soon as the next best-non-tegra2 devices comes up.
[Eee Pad Transformer General] bartleyg82:
If this problem is on Nvidias end, wouldnt these same problems would be seen on the xoom, iconia and galaxy 10.1? I wish that someone who sees the judder could try to replicate it on one of those devices. Everyone I know has ipads, so I dont have the opportunity unfortunately.
[Eee Pad Transformer General] WheresWaldo:
One of the Developer Relations guys for nvidia blamed Asus for the video problems. He specifically mentions in a forum response that the Tegra 2 has hardware support for h264 main profile up to 1080p. His suggestion to the developer was to contact Asus about driver updates and blamed the drivers for stuttering. The OP in that thread was complaining about stuttering in 720p file playback on his Transformer.
[Eee Pad Transformer General] Nascar Dog:
I will "borrow" an Acer Iconia 32GB from Best Buy tonight and test the video performance compared to my Transformer.

Does Acer have a Honeycomb 3.1 update available yet?

Doesn't look like it according to their web site...
[Eee Pad Transformer General] bartleyg82:
That's a good idea. I might stop into a Verizon store to see if I can pop my microsd card into a Xoom to test the videos that have judder on my TF. If the other Tegra2 devices aren't affected by this, I'll probably end up exchanging my TF for a Galaxy 10.1 :(
[Eee Pad Transformer General] WheresWaldo:
I have been playing around with the profile provided in the OP and "translated" it into something Ripbot264 understands with limited success. I am now concentrating my efforts on bitrate to see what the lowest acceptable bitrate is for smooth artifact-limited playback.

Notice it's artifact-limited, not artifact-free. so far in my testing there is a difference in quality of the image on my Dell 2408 monitor and the 10.1" Asus, I can live with slightly less video quality there as I have resigned myself to the fact that I will be doing two encodes of media I want to travel with. Also the smaller screen size tends to minimize some of the color blocking and compression artifacts making them a bit harder to detect while casually viewing. Once my minimum acceptable bitrate established I will start playing with other parameters until I am either satisfied with the results or reconciled to the fact that until HC is mature we won't see much improvement in HD video display.

I hope to exchange some clips with leonpr this weekend to see if we can come to a consensus about quality playback on the TF.
[Eee Pad Transformer General] jjsoviet:
Used the OP's presets, and so far I don't have issues with movie playback - for the most part. In scenes when there's not much action, the Transformer plays videos back smoothly. However, when it changes to scenes with heavy effects or a lot of things going on, the tablet starts to stutter. Precious frames are skipped until it arrives to a part of the movie that isn't as demanding.
[Eee Pad Transformer General] bartleyg82:
I have found that RF of 22-24 using high profile in handbrake produces pretty good results for the TF. Obviously bitrate and final file size will depend a lot on the content, but the few movies that I've encoded (from uncompressed blu-ray rips) have had a bitrate of ~2000-3000 kbps with a final file size of about 1gb/hour, which to me is acceptable. Unfortunately, I can't actually watch them without being driven insane by the judder. Unless of course I encode them without audio which allows the video to play perfectly, but obviously defeats the purpose of the movie.
[Eee Pad Transformer General] WheresWaldo:
I have tried 22 and dropped it back to 20 which I pretty much use as a default setting especially ripping from BRD to mkv for home viewing, of course there I am using High Profile instead of Main Profile. I have a couple of clips done, one anime, one of a recent motion picture and after dinner I will sit down and watch them. The current test has an average bitrate of about 1500 kbps. I am fairly certain that is as low as I would be willing to go for anime and animated movies, but likely will need to increase the bitrate for regular motion pictures. I will re-encode then at a higher bit rate this evening.

The anime was a 25 min episode @ 1080p source, sized down to 720p takes about 18 min to demux, encode, remux. The movie was 96 min BR Rip and took just under 2 hours due to the added time required for normalizing the audio after reducing the 6 channel audio to stereo.

I will try to post clips cut from both video on my dropbox account so others can see if they experience issues with them.

Always have your stuff when you need it with @Dropbox. 2GB account is free!
[Eee Pad Transformer General] levenite:
I think the issue here is you are using "constant quality" for encoding. If I understand this parameter correctly, this causes the bitrate to increase for the more complicated scenes which may be too much much for the decoder, at least at this time. Average bitrate may be a better choice as the decoder will try to keep the bitrate more constant and might not overload the decoder. The idea is during a complex scene with lots of things going on, we might not notice the quality change as much as as during a tranquil scene. An alternative would be to use "constant quality" with a lower quality setting.
[Eee Pad Transformer General] jjsoviet:
Thanks. I'll encode the same video on average bitrate and report how it goes.
[Eee Pad Transformer General] rhcp011235:
works like a charm.

Too bad you need to re-encode / transcode the video to mp4. I tried to use a video player to play a avi. it just crashes. :/
[Eee Pad Transformer General] levenite:
You might not need to. Avi is a container format. It may even contain mpeg4 video. So what you might try is simply convert from avi to mp4 format. It will depend on what codec is used in the Avi container.
[Eee Pad Transformer General] SoCalTiger:
On 3.1, are we still supposed to be using the "Large File Size" option under Advanced? That part of the image is cut-off in the 3.1 screenshot.
[Eee Pad Transformer General] gab1to:
I'm really disappointed because of the 720p lag.

This is just ridiculous. Mi cellphone can play 720p videos without lag and this tablet can't.

I have all my series in 720p .mkv format. If I use the native player, ti will struggle to death but if I use Mobo, it will reproduce it with no sound and like in like a little bit of flash forward motion.

Then I tried the movie Sucker Punch and it lags to hell. The video get stucks forever after 3 seconds. I'm talking about the BRrip 720p AAC-Vision which I think it's the only rip availlable online at this moment. Maybe you guys can try it out and see how bad it reproduces the file.

But if I download a 720p trailer, it will play just fine, smooth as butter.

The thing is, how can I know if the videos that I download will play just fine in the Asus Transformer?

I don't like the idea of encoding all my videos just to play it in this piece of trash LOL.

Let's hope this get fixed soon. I know there's hope.
[Eee Pad Transformer General] galtom:
It will not. Only next generation of Tegra CPU might be solution or Honeycomb Tablet with different CPU.
[Eee Pad Transformer General] deadman3000:
I am glad to see that finally there is some aknowledgment of the video juddering issue and it is generating some healthy debate. Please do check my video on Youtube for a demonstration if you haven't already. Please excuse the silly commentary. I was merely trying to highlight the juddering by making silly noises when it happens just in case you could not see what I was referring to. It's not easy to spot for some people on a small display. Even on a large display some might not notice it. Unfortunately I am VERY susceptible to any juddering issues and getting smooth 24P playback from my PC to my HDTV gave me a lot of trouble initially.

A reminder.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXfdQP8BtEA

Sorry it is standard definition. I do not have HD video recording except on the TF. But it cannot film itself! :P

P.S. I get smooth playback with audio when using the app Megaviewer to watch streamed movies (I won't get into discussion about the legalities just highlight that these standard definition movies do play smooth). I wonder if it's just the fact they are standard def though is the reason they play relatively smooth. Does anyone have a means to download a sample and see what format they are in?
[Eee Pad Transformer General] keef319:
I've tested out a hi def mp4 today.

Works very nice, didn't see any lag. Though I must admit, it is one of those "camera shake for effect" type movies, so maybe I'm just missing the lag! lol.

Anyway, here's the mediainfo details:-

Video

ID : 1

Format : AVC

Format/Info : Advanced Video Codec

Format profile : High@L4.1

Format settings, CABAC : Yes

Format settings, ReFrames : 4 frames

Codec ID : avc1

Codec ID/Info : Advanced Video Coding

Duration : 1h 56mn

Bit rate mode : Variable

Bit rate : 2 673 Kbps

Maximum bit rate : 18.2 Mbps

Width : 1 280 pixes

Height : 532 pixels

Display aspect ratio : 2.40:1

Frame rate mode : Constant

Frame rate : 23.976 fps

Color space : YUV

Chroma subsampling : 4:2:0

Bit depth : 8 bits

Scan type : Progressive

Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.164

Stream size : 2.17 GiB (93%)

Writing library : x264 core 114 r1924 08d04a4

Encoding settings : cabac=1 / ref=4 / deblock=1:-3:-1 / analyse=0x3:0x133 / me=umh / subme=9 / psy=1 / psy_rd=1.00:0.15 / mixed_ref=1 / me_range=16 / chroma_me=1 / trellis=2 / 8x8dct=1 / cqm=0 / deadzone=21,11 / fast_pskip=1 / chroma_qp_offset=-3 / threads=6 / sliced_threads=0 / nr=0 / decimate=1 / interlaced=0 / constrained_intra=0 / bframes=3 / b_pyramid=2 / b_adapt=2 / b_bias=0 / direct=3 / weightb=1 / open_gop=0 / weightp=2 / keyint=250 / keyint_min=23 / scenecut=40 / intra_refresh=0 / rc_lookahead=60 / rc=2pass / mbtree=1 / bitrate=2673 / ratetol=1.0 / qcomp=0.60 / qpmin=0 / qpmax=69 / qpstep=4 / cplxblur=20.0 / qblur=0.5 / vbv_maxrate=50000 / vbv_bufsize=50000 / nal_hrd=none / ip_ratio=1.40 / aq=1:1.00

Encoded date : UTC 2011-06-03 08:39:46

Tagged date : UTC 2011-06-02 22:58:34

Audio

ID : 2

Format : AAC

Format/Info : Advanced Audio Codec

Format profile : LC

Codec ID : 40

Duration : 1h 56mn

Bit rate mode : Variable

Bit rate : 192 Kbps

Maximum bit rate : 200 Kbps

Channel(s) : 2 channels

Channel positions : Front: L R

Sampling rate : 48.0 KHz

Compression mode : Lossy

Can you tell me if you spot something in there that's different and may be a cause for "good" results...?

Cheers
[Eee Pad Transformer General] deadman3000:
I've found a method to give nearly 100% smooth playback and also plays any audio format thrown at it. The snag is your have to stream it and have your computer transcode it on-the-fly. Oh and I can't get subtitles to work is the other snag even though the server side supports it (Might be a problem with the andriod app).

Plex.

It allows streaming your local media as well as other online media. You can stream over local wifi at up to 5Mbit, remote wifi and 3G.

Looks very promising but not ideal if you are trying to play something local. I don't understand why streaming it would play smooth but locally does not. It automatically seems to scale the video to the TF at very high quality (at least for local wifi). And hardly any judder I can notice whatsoever!

EDIT: Nevermind. It's smoother but not 100% smooth. It has a judder but just judders slightly differently. Seems to judder a lot faster and more randomly. It's still better than other playback methods though.

EDIT2: I noticed it uses ffmpeg for transcoding so it's probably streaming as MPEG2 which would make sense.
[Eee Pad Transformer General] Nascar Dog:
I picked up an Acer Iconia 32GB at Best Buy and after testing the same videos I tried on my Transformer I found the Acer to studder and stumble worse!

It probably is worse because it still has Honeycomb 3.01.
[Eee Pad Transformer General] SoCalTiger:
Answered my own question. Sorta. I tried both methods with the same video last night and the file size came out exactly the same. :confused: So I guess I'll just leave it off.
[Eee Pad Transformer General] bartleyg82:
If anyone would like to test the judder on their TF or if anyone has a Xoom/Iconia/GT10.1 that they would like to test, here are sample clips demonstrating the problem that I'm seeing.

These are two minute clips from Pan's Labyrinth encoded straight from a blu-ray rip using Handbrake and the suggested settings in this thread (except I used RF of 24 to keep file size down). The clips are only 20-30 mb each. On my TF, both clips with audio have judder. The clip without audio while not perfect is much smoother. If you watch the clips, pay particular attention during the 7-15 second mark and watch the trees in the background as the camera pans. BTW, subtitles are hardcoded.

High profile, AAC audio:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=OPVA8KY8

Base profile, AAC audio:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=KTNJ1ZRM

High profile, NO audio:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=NT49MJZH
[Eee Pad Transformer General] usafle:
I just spent 2.5 hours using handbrake to encode Cop Land (1080p) only to have it stutter and lag like crazy. :(

I have no issues playing a 720p encoded movie using these handbrake settings but the 1080 movie is unwatchable.
[Eee Pad Transformer General] Remenic:
Currently waiting for my Transformer to arrive. But if what you say is true, that a SoC produced in 2010 by arguably the greatest GPU producer is unable to decode 720p smoothly, then that's just a big fat fail. :(