yashsingh1/xdaforums huggingface dataset:
[Touch HD General] tnyynt:
I am running smoothly 640x360/640x480/720x480 videos at 1200 kbps video and 128 kbps stereo audio regardless of 3GP or AVI (DivX) format. Bench shows 98 - 110% with high quality setting in CorePlayer.
[Touch HD General] Guus_:
Which means; the average speed is ~105%, so on fast moving scenes you get framedrops with like -~6-10fps. Very smooth... :rolleyes:

I got the idea that a lot of you guys make the problem sound less worse then it is. By telling us; I run video's smoothly, I got a solution, just resize it to a fourth of the resolution, its all good etc. But in fact; we need at least an average speed of ~150%> to run video's smoothly, and reencoding is no option for a device like this.
[Touch HD General] tnyynt:
I take this chance to express my disagreement with your sarcastic statement! No framerate drops!

About the average speed, I told you different results for different frame sizes.
[Touch HD General] Raziel1:
Yeah, but thats quiet unrealistic and you can't expect such a thing from a mobilephone..
[Touch HD General] Bubble_Master:
normal videos?

has anyone tried some normal videos????? you know like at a normal resolution. Like the Ironman movie I have is 664 x 268. I would love it if the Touch HD played movies like that smoothly. Not every video is going to be 800 x 480. Most of them would be smaller. Just try playing some trailer that was in a resolution near that one.
[Touch HD General] pzucchel:
I correct my previous statement. After fiddling a bit with the parameters (and importantly restarting coreplayer) i got very good results. Now i am playing with the encoding optimization, in attachment the parameters i am currently testing. I think it would be nice if any of you would upload their settings and comment about the result - i understand that most of us are using the pocketdivxencoder (which is just a frontend to mencoder...right?)

Indeed, as pointed out by Millenius, I didn't see any difference between 240x400 and 400x240.
[Touch HD General] pzucchel:
I fully agree on this point. Even a normal PC would find it very hard to do it on the fly, and only because of dedicated hardware we are able to do it. This hardware would eat so much energy on a phone that, i believe, will come only in 3-5 years from now (better batteries and/or better silicon substrates...)
[Touch HD General] pzucchel:
don't worry about aspect ratios, as usual you will get side bands. Somehow i agree with millenius: are you able to see the difference between a 400x240 and higher resolutions? if so, we should try to improve it - but indeed movies in 400x240 are very nice-looking, the only feeling i have is...they would look better on a 50" screen!
[Touch HD General] MAK11:
EXACTLY!!!!

Does who are *****ing should stop and think a bit. You can't expect the phone to play Straight rips (wery high bitrate on video and audio) . You have to either lower the video bitrate, audio bitrate (people forget about this, just run a Bench with audio muted and see the difference!) or lower the ress.
[Touch HD General] tregba:
I disagree, if you take any smartphone with an XScale CPU it will play back a typical divx/xvid movie/tv show without any problems extremely smoothly with typical benchmarks of around 180%. The problem is in the CPU of the Qualcomm chipsets. They don't have any special functions that can be manipulated to allow smooth playback such as MMX on the Xscale. On top of this there are no API's available for its dedictaed 3d chip for developers to take advanage of.

Unfortunately reencoding is not really a solution as any cheapo phone is capable of smooth video playback just so long as its reencoded! The fact that the HD runs WM6, costs a bundle and smooth divx playback is something most WinMob users have been accustomed to since the days of the early iPaq's is (around 2001) is what makes the current situation unacceptable!!
[Touch HD General] ez2remember:
I wouldn't call it unrealistic. My Nokia N95 8GB with Coreplayer can play most DivX/Xvid videos without re-encoding (anything below 600pixels seems fine). That is with a 330Mhz CPU...

The Samsung Omnia can play most/all videos super smoothly without re-encoding.

It's not the HTC is not powerful enough, it's because of the situation with the drivers.

More info with this thread.

http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=444494
[Touch HD General] Guus_:
I can't add anything to that, that's just how it is.

Thanks for the positive update tnyynt!

I believe that you saw the video's as smooth. But in reality the benchmarks only gives results in average speed. Which means, that ~100% performance means; 100% performance in average. So in very fast moving scenes, like car chases or something :) (which take a much higher bitrate then slow moving scenes, like talk-scenes :)), the file will play with ~70% of the speed of the average speed. So in that case it's not smooth anymore, it will result in framedrops.

I'm setting my hopes on CorePlayer version 1.3>, if they can make a speed increasement of like ~30%, all movies will play fine. Maybe it's also achievable without the drivers...
[Touch HD General] chaps:
Over on the Corecodec forums, It has already been stated that 1.3 will not bring any QTV improvements, only bug fixes.

I'm gutted my new HD cannot play 800x480 divx files without re-encoding them. It has the hardware to do it, it has the name implying it can do it. But not the software drivers.
[Touch HD General] Raspail:
While playing back videos isn't my priority (I'm more interested in the size of the screen for the web or online TV) I have to agree with you. One of the biggest announced advantage on competitors is the size and resolution. Obviously HTC has failed there when it comes to videos.

Now, I still consider the work done by Millenius as a great step forward. From a complete disaster on videos he shows there is a way to save some as far as you re-encode (a PC + time consuming) and use the appropriate parameters (but of a paying software).

If I want to travel with a couple of my fav movies, this is something I'm ready to do. But about catching videos here and there while traveling and connected (or exchanged with someone on the road) I understand several past smartphone are... smarter.

The terrible side of the story is to buy a Touch HD now, when the Touch HD II will come out in a couple of months (like they did for the TyTn II) with...

rights to use the hardware accelerator of the processor, and a flash for the camera.

This business is made of enthousiatic (to buy now) AND frustrated (to buy again to-morrow) users. My bet is those limitations are not totally there by chance or pure bad job. :D
[Touch HD General] Insaneboy:
They've been there for 2 years now, would be weird if they overcome them in a month or so. :D
[Touch HD General] ekerbuddyeker:
the guts of the HD seem to be exactly the same as the Diamond and Pro and we Pro / diamond users have been having these exact problems for months. I guess it isnt a priority for HTC to sort it out.
[Touch HD General] Raspail:
If the point is to buy the rights to use the hardware graphic accelerator of the processor (which apparently exists but is not used) and the appropriate drivers, some extra tuning may be a matter of a couple of months.... and less considreing the first buyers are the usual guinea pigs to deal with bugs. :D

If the point is to use another processor (Intel?) to match the capaclity of the screen, then you are right.

Now the quesion is:

Is that a commercial strategy step and it can be fixed soon?

Or a development mistake and it will take longer?
[Touch HD General] Sasimi:
To all of those that actually believe what they're saying: the omnia does actually playback high res[note: HIGH RES =/= 720p]videos, since it's fully hardware accelerated.

And nice solution...not. if you transcode the video to 1/4 of it's size and can't see the difference...well...I pity you.

EDIT: Before someone ''smart'' tells me that the HD has 3+times higher res than the Omnia. The scaling part uses only a small amount of cpu, it's mainly the ''re-encode'' part that requires the power.
[Touch HD General] rovex:
I always re-encode to save memory space anyway. Next month ATI are launching their GPU recode application that can encode about 15X faster than a quad core, it wont be a problem to me.

Being able to play a 720P movie is nice, but that would take up about 4GB of space (if you are taking about the average HD download or BR rip).

Ive tested 400x240 and it plays well enough for me.
[Touch HD General] razor_amd:
Movies

I thought that Touch HD should be able to play full DivX movies without any conversion. I'm expecting mine to come in 3 days (tuesday i think).

When I was in Germany to CeBIT fair I downloaded 2 full DivX 700MB movies on my HTC TyTN MicroSD card (didn't have time to re-encode) and I watched them perfectly without any glitch during the flight, didn't re-compress or anything. I also watched some Full DivX movies over my network at home (network storage) but then there were some glitches because it went over a WiFi connection...

I supposed that Touch HD can also play Full DivX movies without any conversion because it is newer and better but when i read this, I'm sad :(

Or I'm getting this whole thing wrong and you're talking about HD movies :D (i hope so)
[Touch HD General] BANE:
Unfortunately it isn't simply about HD video.

There are reported issues of stuttery performances with some files. I am unsure of the technics of it, but certain specific factors such as resolution and video and audio bitrate have a part to play.

I understand that the PROBLEM here is that HTC have not provided users with software drivers (or spent the money developing) to fully unleash the hardware which is present... this is such a frustration.

In saying this, I have seen more than one youtube video with perfect playback of non encoded files, so I guess it all depends on what kind of file you are trying to play PRE conversion. I ordered mine thursday... hope to have it this week and look forward to experimenting with this issue. I'm not a user of HIGH quality video on the move, but it would certainly be handy NOT to have to reencode video for use on the device.

Until then, htcclassactionsuit, lets keep the pressure on, perhaps hardware support could come in the future?

....IB a n e
[Touch HD General] BerreZ:
?!?!?!?

I tried different possibility and came with a perfect working solution.

Use Pocketdivxencoder to encode the video with following options:

Chose PC , video quality 48 (= bitrate 752),audio quality 7(=stereo 128kpbs,frequency 44100 hz,mp3),dimension 512X288 ( not so important ),original framerate (25fps), and 2 pass encoding.

I use Core player 2,5 to watch the encoded video with following options :video Qtv display (TyTN II driver mode), video quality high , zoom always .

Result is stuning , always benchmark over 100 %. even better than a video encoded in mp' or 3gp format and played with the original video player of the HD.

So ok you will have to spent some time encoding , but what the ....

You are reading this too at this moment .......
[Touch HD General] townkat:
SPB Benchmark CPU comparison

Samsung Omnia

Marvell PXA312 624 MHz

CPU index 1875.39

(source http://mobile.mail.ru/reviews/samsung/Samsung_WiTu-rev.html)

HTC HD

Qualcomm MSM7201A 528 Mhz

CPU index 2250

(source http://www.myphone.gr/forum/showthread.php?p=2579117)

Seems to me that Qualcomm is the best choice for HD. Of corse it have lower video performance than Omnia, it have twice the resolution.

This comparison clearly shows that graphics performance and resolution are directly related http://img407.imageshack.us/img407/7268/htcrg0.png.

I am sure that the new wvga t-omnia will perform worse that HD on video benchmarks even if it have the 806 mhz CPU (and probably horible battery life).

"I always re-encode to save memory space anyway. "

what about playing directly from the network ?

btw, funny clip related to our hobby ;)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pgsw-NgDoFE&feature=related
[Touch HD General] razorblader:
Being one of the people having purchased the HD also for its promised multimedia capabilities, possibly :) because of claims like this:

from the HTC homepage I wonder about comments from other people that you can't expect decent video performance from a smartphone or that lower resolution video files work just fine and that this fact solves the problem...this is not some little smartphone it's a pretty expensive state of the art PocketPC with a screen resolution that's almost HD (480p equals 852x480) and being advertised like this:

Quite frankly, not only do I expect it to play files with a higher resolution than 400x240 without dropping frames like it's a contest but ideally it should play at least some of the more common formats with a built-in mediaplayer provided by HTC instead of relying on some third-party software that costs extra and does not even support the chipset of the HD (and quite a few other HTC devices). If HTC does not want to spend the extra money for the proper drivers they do not have the right to advertise this product as a multimedia miracle, period.

The HD is otherwise a great product, but the promises made as far as multimedia capabilities are concerned are dishonest und will lead a lot of people to purchase it based on claims that are not true. Much better video performance has been seen in other devices, my Polaris plays a file encoded in 480x270 with slightly better performance than the HD and the Polaris video performance sucks as well, also because of missing drivers...it has the slower CPU, go figure...

Saying that only Qualcomm's pricing policy is to blame for the lacking drivers is giving HTC a free ride to churn out more devices that do not deliver on certain fronts and to never do anything about it. Just my two cents.
[Touch HD General] agmorpheus:
Why does the Touch 3G have such good graphic results? The HD is the worst in graphics! Is the Touch maybe accelerated by the drives that are missing at the HD?
[Touch HD General] tregba:
This is partly wrong. While the Qualcomm CPU is indeed faster when it comes to FPU as I'm pretty sure the reference point used by SPB benchmark, it is not better for GPU performance. So for some WM activity the Qualcomm probably feels a little snappier. However, when it comes to video acceleration this is where the newer and to a larger degree older Xscale CPUS leave the Qualcomm for dust. It has special instructions prebuilt to allow for faster video handling and SPB benchmark doesn;t take this into account.

So, moving onto the t-omnia, I have no doubt that it will perform almost as well as the standard res. omnia. That is to say, if wqvga benches typically at 220% in coreplayer, then the t-omnia wvga version will most likely typically bench around 150%. Older generation, arguably faster for video, xscale vga devices typically bench around 180% so I can pretty much guarantee video rendering won't deteriorate to the abysmal levels of the Touch HD!

I for one will be buying a device with a similar sized screen based on the Marvell chipset if something is to come out soon as it seems a bit of a waste to have such a large screen but not the ability to play back typical divx movies without conversion. If the t-omnia does indeed come to the UK relatively soon, it may well be my next device!
[Touch HD General] tregba:
No, I can only presume since the Qualcomm cpu has very little ability to handle any form of graphic acceleration then there is practically a linear difference in graphic ability represented by the resolutions of both devices. Since Touch 3g is qvga it will bench 4x higher than Touch HD.
[Touch HD General] townkat:
yup, that's the ideea

I could not find any tcmp/coreplayer benchmark of a vga xscale pda with a similar movie (~1MB data rate, ~600x~350). If u have any please write them here. I think is easy to get a 600% benchmark with the right movie in the HD too, but to be relevant they should be benchmarked with similar videos.

also

t-omnia vs hd

should be close to

omnia (wqvga) vs htc 3g (qvga)

right ?

i couldnt't find some relevant benchmarks of the two either, but maybe someone can help with this since they are both available.

untill then we can only compare graphics indexes of them, wich i personaly consider pretty relevant to the video performance of a pda

graphics indexes of both:

touch-3g 6760

omnia 5591

(source http://www.myphone.gr/forum/showthread.php?p=2579117)

But omnia have 25% more pixels to process and t-omnia have 30% faster cpu.

In conclusion, it is very probable that Samsung T-Omnia (WVGA) will have 34% better graphics index than HTC HD (WVGA).

(5591*1.25*1.3/6760 ;) )

So, they knew that wvga is too much for 624 xscale, and mounted a 806mhz xscale. That should do the job i think, but i am really curious about the battery performance and temperature of that device...
[Touch HD General] eaglesteve:
If we're happy with poorer QVGA picture quality in favour of higher benchmark speed, why not simply go to the HD and within coreplayer set the Video quality to medium rather than high and see your benchmark shoots up above 100%? In this way, there would not be any need to encode.

For me, if the video resolution is already low to begin with, the speed is normally already above 100% so I play it in high quality mode. If it is a very high resolution one, playing it in medium quality quality does not render the resolution so bad that I could tell the difference anyway.

So, never found video playback an issue.

If it is a really really high res movies, I use my home theatre system. :-)
[Touch HD General] Bubble_Master:
WTF????

This is horrible!!!!!!!!!!! WHY HTC??????? WHYYYYYYYYYY?????????????

Why would they expect us to pay more than $700 dollars to get a phone that cant even do what it's meant to. This is crazy. Why the hell didn't they even put drivers in for the video accelerator. I think I won't be buying the HD anymore. Take this as a tip HTC:

Please put in drivers for the hardware you put in your devices and also, don't do false marketing. Im sure you've just wasted atleast 100 peoples' hard earned money and will probably waste more in the next few months.
[Touch HD General] tregba:
I've had a demon of a video file for a while now that I normally to use see if a device can handle media playback well. It's 720x480, 24fps, 1.35Mbps video, 192kbps audio. On my touch pro I bench around 65% under qtv. With my previous Axim X51v I remember benching around 130% under xscale. With the TP playback is smooth in slow scenes but falls flat in fast scenes. With the X51v it was smooth playback all the way with the occasional tearing (though very infrequent).

I wouldn't read to much into spb benchmarks especially for graphic index as they don't always use correct/recent methods for measuring true graphic ability (3d/2d/vid accel.?!). Come to think of it I'm not particularly sure what parts of a GPU, if present, are measured under there term 'index' and whether their software has been properly written to address those parts.

Also, the comparison between the omnia and t-omnia is not fair. The touch 3g and HD one is though. I say this because the Qualcomms have little or no video accelerations prebuilt into their cpus therefore there will be a linear increase in performance yield related to increasing resolution. However, this is not the case with the omnias where there is video accel. therefore performance increases with increasing resolution will be non linear. Thus a 624mhz marvell may be more than adequate for the t-omnia for video playback which I suspect is the case.

Yes, that is what I sometimes do on files that are simply too much for the Touch Pro. However, it can no way be likened to watching the same file on a qvga screen (qvga quality will still be better and smoother)! Coreplayer's compression algorithms are pretty aggressive so when you drop to medium quality the video quality is quite bad giving extremely soft images. Not so bad that its unwatchable but its a makeshift solution I guess.
[Touch HD General] eaglesteve:
I tried reducing to medium. It's not that bad as far as picture quality goes. At least it is perfectly smooth with zero frame skip.
[Touch HD General] miguel.netreg:
Like with most of the other HTC devices, I'm sure HTC will release a ROM update probably including drivers. However, as also done for most previous roms, someone with find a driver and release it on the forum or even cook a new rom with the updated driver. That's why we love this forum!.. :D

In the meantime, you can all spam HTC with customer complaints to push a ROM upgrade with improved drivers... Anything else will only affect your blood pressure.
[Touch HD General] nin2thevoid:
If you prefer performance over sharpness, yes it is a good solution, but the above argumentation is not correct.

Having a video encoded for values lower than the device's display DPI value means you WILL see the quality difference.

The difference would hardly be visible on e.g. a HVGA iPhone screen but on the HD you will most certainly see that you have less than a quarter of the pixels, which removes that lush sense of sharpness that the screen is capable of outputting.
[Touch HD General] nin2thevoid:
I never understood what all the playback complaints originated from on the HD... I probably missed something but what are you guys playing, 4GB DVD rips? Since you already understand that a 800x480 display is not capable of displaying HD resolution, meaning that a regular 800MB file contains about as much detail as you could possibly need on the HD...

Well, I watch regular 800MB-1.5GB AVI files on my HD using CorePlayer and the playback is almost flawless. Almost meaning, I had to tinker a little with the default CorePlayer settings to optimize for the HD, nothing fancy.

It plays, looks and sounds perfect. Far better video experience than I have had on any other phone, largely due to huge surface of the display, and apart from that, due to the high resolution and powerful enough processor.

Edit: I don't do benchmarks, which may indeed give less than 100% results, but I benchmark the real life experience only, which I find more than satisfactory... iPhone and other HTC users I know are all equally impressed when I demo some nice movies...
[Touch HD General] nin2thevoid:
I don't mean to bash the proposed solution in the first post, but indeed these settings appear to only apply only to the proposed solution itself. I tried them with regular DivX files and got really choppy, non-synched frames, which seems like what you are trying to describe.

I changed the rendering mode back to Qtv and it was all dandy again, I think the rest of the settings do improve the picture, as my only gripe was that I had slightly visible screen redraw with very fast moving images, not so anymore with these settings apart from the "raw framebuffer" tip, which screwed everything up.

Actually, what this makes me conclude once again is:

It does not matter how much you benchmark the playback, the only thing that counts is how it looks in real life situations. The raw frame buffering probably made your benchmark look better, but it makes for VERY choppy image sequencing, which probably is not noticable on 240*400 movies (not tested), but it CERTAINLY is noticable on regular divX resolutions.

Kind of the same thing when turning off V synching in desktop games. Sure you get more FPS, but it looks horrible in many situations. Like I care if I get 30 or 50 FPS, I want it to look perfect. Same goes for those people trying to get 150+ FPS in games. The human brain can only differentiate between 33FPS.

So if you get 200+% in some benchmark, better keep tuning for better visual quality in your proposal since you got a lot of headroom left for that, and any speed above perfect playback speed is irrelevant anyway. Heck you might as well go back to DivX resolution, which is perceivably sharper :)

There, enough ranting and posts in a row :)