[Nook Color General] gijosh28:
Hi All,

So I have read all the threads I could find about video players on the Nook Color, and I am still having a little trouble. I don't know if its normal, so I am looking for some help/advice/guidance. This is going to be long, but it's because I am trying to be as thorough as I can.

My Goal:

To have a 7" tablet that browses the web, reads/writes email, lets me IM, reads ebooks, plays video files from my video collection, plays music from my collection, runs Pandora, Netflix, and Hulu, and is capable of swype (slideit).

What I have:

I have a brand new Nook Color that I bought just for turning into a tablet to play with (3 days ago). I started by rooting with nooter, and flashing CM 7.0.3 stable (2 days ago) to the emmc through CWM. I have since updated to CM7 Nightly #144 (today - more on that later)

My problems:

So I was happy with everything in CM 7.0.3 except for its video playing capabilities. I was using Moboplayer (I didn't download any codecs or anything, just straight moboplayer from Market). I know that the advice of the professionals on here is to use handbrake to convert whatever video you want to watch to an exact format that is ideal for the Nook, however, I, like many other people on here, have tons of movies (7 TB), and I have tons of places that I play them (every console, psp's, ds's, laptops and netbooks aplenty, etc.). So I don't want to convert them, and I have read several threads where people are playing un-converted videos without problems. So I picked a random episode and tried to play it. Here are the specs of that video.

Total file size: 349MB

Video -

Length: 42:26

Frame width: 624

Frame height: 352

Data Rate: 1003kbps

Total bitrate: 1152kbps

Frame rate: 23 frames/second

Audio -

Bit rate: 149kbps

Channels: 2(stereo)

Audio sample rate: 48 kHz

While in 7.0.3 with Moboplayer the video runs ok and the audio is sync'd up fine, but its not silky smooth. It looks like its running at about 18fps. I don't know how to find the exact framerate, but it is just a little less then when it plays on my computer, and it is just barely low enough to cause enough chop to be annoying. So the first thing I tried was downloading Dalingrin's 042411 OC kernel for eMMC. I thought if I overclocked my processor, it might solve the problem, and my research on this forum led me to believe that was the right OC file for my version of CM. I set both the min and the max to 1300 and still had the problem. In my research I also found that many people were talking about how Dalingrin had unlocked hardware decoding in some of the newer CM nightlies. Also, the OC kernel already exists in the newer nightlies. So I downloaded the newest nightly. I am now on #144. Once I got back up and running, I downloaded Moboplayer and tried again. Same problem. Even overclocked. I saw someone mentioned using the Neon codec pack for moboplayer. For some reason the Neon codec pack doesnt show up in my market (although a bunch of other Moboplayer codec packs do). So I went to Moboplayers website and downloaded the Neon codec pack zip file. I tried to install it with CWM in recovery mode, but it keeps failing. Having done some more research I downloaded a player called VitalPlayer Neon (there is a non Neon version but I paid for and installed the Neon version). When I play that same avi file in VitalPlayer is starts it and a little window pops up at the very beginning that says "Software codec play!!" The video (and several others like it) plays silky smooth. I couldn't ask for a better video playing experience. However, if I go into the settings for VitalPlayer (Settings -> Decode Mode) and tell it to use hardware codec, when I try to play the file its says, "Can't be played!!" Am I missing something?

Summary - So my questions are:

1) Is there a way to monitor FPS?

2) Don't I want my video player running with Hardware codec?

3) Why isn't my video player running with hardware codec?

/** Note relavant to thread *

<rant>

When I am done, I am going to write (yet another) guide for how to do this the easiest way for someone looking for a tablet/ereader experience like I was, that doesn't mind paying a couple dollars to get it right. The advice I have gotten on this site has been AWESOME, I just wish it was compiled a little better. It seems like people try so hard to get the free apps to do what they want, that they miss the $1.49 app that does it perfectly. And you have to dig to find the non-free apps that do what you want. Theres a few threads where people are jumping through hoops, spending hours and days, and screwing up the CM installs to get swype to work when for $4.99 SlideIt is up and working perfectly in seconds. Money well spent for me. Also, the $1.49 for ezPDF was priceless compared to the hours I spent trying other pdf readers that wouldn't even remember what page I was on when I stopped reading. ezPDF should be the defacto standard for PDF reading IMO. I can even resize what I am reading to a legible size and it will wordwrap (text reflow) for me so I don't have to move left and right on each line.

</rant>

Thanks,

Josh