Best Handheld for playing back high res/bitrate videos?
 

One thing that really has disappointed me in my Nokia N800 and other handle is that they can't handle high resolution videos. Even 640x480 high-bitrate video can't be played back without shuttering or dropping frames. Of course playing back unconverted 1920x1080,1280x720, or even smaller video is unwatchable.

What I have been looking for is Handheld device that can play back my high-resolution, bit-rate anime video files without any problems. Most of these files are encoded in x264 (not same as H264 codec). I am trying find handheld has good resolution (800x480), like N800.

Any suggestion on handhelds that can actually handle high-resolution/bitrate videos? Probably a handheld with hardware decoding for videos (like ATI Imegeon + TCMCP) should be able to handle it. But I haven't really heard any verified information about this yet.

Re: Best Handheld for playing back high res/bitrate videos?
 

Any new device with Cortex A8 + PowerVR SGX has the potential to do so. The software is the current limitation:

Omnia Pro, Omnia II, iPhone 3GS, Nokia RX-51, Motorola Sholes, etc

Re: Best Handheld for playing back high res/bitrate videos?
 

ysss and iPhone .... we know... forget about it! since when iphone has high res? with its 480x320 ... compared it to 800x480

Re: Best Handheld for playing back high res/bitrate videos?
 

Ooh lookie, the Anti-Apple radar is at work ;)

It was just a short list of Cortex A8 devices that I could remember off hand. A starting point for the poster to read up more about the main achilles heel he was complaining about: "N800 and other handhelds can't handle high resolution videos".

Re: Best Handheld for playing back high res/bitrate videos?
 

Well, does any of them actually implement or have software to handle high resolution video?

I have looked at iPhone 3GS a lot, but it just doesn't have hi-resolution video playback capability. Also as Architengi mentioned, its only 480x320 resolution lcd, worse than the N800...

Nokia RX-51 - haven't heard of any specific mention to ability to playback high resolution video either. I some how doubt hi-res video playback will be supported anytime soon on it.

Note sure about the others though.

Re: Best Handheld for playing back high res/bitrate videos?
 

http://www.gsmarena.com/iphone_3gs_p...-news-1080.php

http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/20/i...ideo-playback/

Re: Best Handheld for playing back high res/bitrate videos?
 

The N800 is not a PMP, granted, but 640x480 is mostly doable with some tweaking (44.1kHz audio and mplayer with high bitrate configs, bitrate depending on codec).

If you want flawless HD playback, you need a 'real' PMP for that, and even there you won't find all that many devices that do resolutions like 1080p (the closest to what you say is the Archos 5, with a 800x480 screen, but even with special DSP codecs it does only 720p).

That is misleading. AFAIK They made a custom codec that transcodes 1080p streams into iPhone-ish resolution (which is less than half the pixel count of a N800).

Re: Best Handheld for playing back high res/bitrate videos?
 

@attila: very interesting. I read somewhere that high-def movies from itunes store come in multiple resolution for the different target device (desktop & apple tv + handheld version), and you're right, this could be making use of that feature of the stream is indeed embedded in the same file.

But 'transcode' may not be the proper term.. just multiple streams with different resolution & bitrate in a single container.

Other than Archos (which I heard is a licensing nightmare, having to buy codec plugins and all that), you can check out the Creative Zii too...

Re: Best Handheld for playing back high res/bitrate videos?
 

No, the stream is a regular video stream. The point is that the codec 'knows' it needs to output a low, fixed resolution image. In other words, it can cheat as you won't see the difference anyway. With 1080p trailers you need to divide by 4 to get iPhone resolution, in effect meaning that the gain is in not decoding whole 8x8 blocks, but probably coming up with a (DSP accelerated way) of getting a 2x2 block from the original (or maybe just a single pixel and little extra info to help interpolation).

Re: Best Handheld for playing back high res/bitrate videos?
 

Well, Samsung claims to be able to do 720p video in this diagram:

http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/...samsungsoc.jpg

Re: Best Handheld for playing back high res/bitrate videos?
 

The articles you linked in clearly referred to (and demoed!) 1080p (h264 at that) playback. Most of the current gen HW is capable of 720p (which is roughly half the block/pixel count of 1080p).

Re: Best Handheld for playing back high res/bitrate videos?
 

Here is my question and answer to Eldar regarding video play back and his answer

http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...1&postcount=19

Re: Best Handheld for playing back high res/bitrate videos?
 

Saying "plays all high bitrate videos" is kinda generic :) Just for comparison, the NEON optimized mplayer on the beagleboard also does 720p. But, of course, laziness beats sense, every time, everywhere (having HD content on the RX51 makes no sense as you won't see the resolution difference, it will take more time to copy/dowload, shorten battery life, and use up more space on the device - but hey ! it's HD).

Re: Best Handheld for playing back high res/bitrate videos?
 

@attila77: as mentioned earlier (or perhaps on a similar thread before), this is useful for bringing high def media to be output on a higher resolution device.

Re: Best Handheld for playing back high res/bitrate videos?
 

Neat! How much did this iRadar app cost? Does it run in the background like a spider sense, or you must switch to it every time? :p

Re: Best Handheld for playing back high res/bitrate videos?
 

I think you need [faulty idealism] in order to get it... and it negatively affects the following attributes:
- social graces
- perspective
- intelligence

Re: Best Handheld for playing back high res/bitrate videos?
 

I'm under the impression that's a minority use case (compared to plain laziness). And the number of devices (even PMPs !) confirmed to actually do quality external HD playback is low, really low (the connectors seen in the leaks suggest that the RX51 is not going to be one of those, either).

Re: Best Handheld for playing back high res/bitrate videos?
 

Well the major reason for me asking the question is that i hated video conversion. I just want to download any video from the internet and play it automatically.

Something not many devices can do at this point...

Re: Best Handheld for playing back high res/bitrate videos?
 

The thing is, the internet will always contain video that plays on most desktop computers. Desktop computers OTOH, will always be more powerful than mobile devices. So, by the time you get mobile devices powerful enough to playback content meant for desktops, the desktops will likely start using something 'stronger', with higher resolution, better compression, etc.

Also, keep in mind 1080p is just a resolution. It almost certainly does not mean it will work with ALL bitrates, codecs and profiles at that resolution (i.e. you have H264 profiles for 1080p that have a 1GBps (!) bitrate, what are the chances of a mobile device playing that back ?)

Re: Best Handheld for playing back high res/bitrate videos?
 

Take a look at Zii EGG with High Definition 1080p Output :) Not for sale yet though :(

http://www.zii.com/Developer/Landing.aspx

Re: Best Handheld for playing back high res/bitrate videos?
 

@attila77: 1080p x264 mkv files are already REALLY good on 50" 1080p screens.. and the sources aren't going any higher resolution anytime soon. I think it's safe to say this standard will be here for another 3-5 years. Plenty enough time for mobile hardware to catch up.

I'm not sure battery technology will be good enough to make it practical to use this on the move within the same time frame though.

Re: Best Handheld for playing back high res/bitrate videos?
 

This is mine main reason for this thread also. I have 1-2 Terabytes of Anime in x264 codec 1080P and 720P. I don't want to have bother converting all of them to specific format required for playback. Not mention it take awhile to transcode them to the proper format and you need to find the proper tools to do so.

One of my main concern is hardware acceleration specifically for x264 encoded video. I read and seen hardware acceleration for H264 doesn't work for x264 out of box:

http://www.xpmediacentre.com.au/comm...tion-dxva.html
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/archi.../t-852481.html

I personally have a Nvida card on PC with PureHD but it doesn't do anything for off loading the x264 work (played back with cccp). My CPU does all the processing. Trying to off load x264 might take a lot of hacking and in fact I haven't heard of anyone getting it to work yet. :mad: Luckily I have fast enough CPU for this!

I want to make sure the PMP/MID/handheld in question actually support x264 1080P decoding specifically. If anyone has info about a demonstration of x264 (x264 specifically not H264) 1080P being played back on handheld please let me know! Thanks.

Note, I also do think 1080P will max resolution for alteast 3-5 years.

Re: Best Handheld for playing back high res/bitrate videos?
 

That's an excellent example of the how 1080p is a 1080p. The spec sheet claims 720p MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 HD decode Main profile at 30 fps, 8mbps bitstream (which is actually not that much among HD profiles). In the same spec sheet you'll see that the 1080p is for the TV encoder.

So be careful about that 1080p sticker, it is abused to extremes by the marketing departments.

1080p is just the resolution. There's a bit more behind the story.

Re: Best Handheld for playing back high res/bitrate videos?
 

(offtopic)
Hardware decoding of x264 (it's an encoder) encoded AVC/H.264 (the standard) video stream inside a matroska (mkv) container works fine with e.g. Media Player Classic - Home Cinema (Windows, both ATI and NV) or by installing latest CoreAVC software decoder, which uses NV's CUDA-technology. With that you can use any DirectShow-cabable media player. Lots of useful discussion in e.g. doom9 forums.

Hardware-decoded video playback on Linux is AFAIK best with e.g. XBMC. It uses VDPAU-technology for the GPU offloading.

I have 0 knowledge on Macs/OS X, but it should be possible as well, at least on Snow Leopard (OpenCL). Anyway on intel macs you can always dual-boot to Windows ;)
(/offtopic)

I doubt Nokia will support matroska container in out-of-the-box sw for _any_ of it's new hardware. Inside a mp4 or avi, 800x480p playback with a reasonable bitrate (let's say <5 Mbps) at film fps is probably quite nice on any OMAP3 device.

Re: Best Handheld for playing back high res/bitrate videos?
 

If you think about it, the habit of just moving the high quality files to your mobile device and play them, even tough we might not take full advatage of the quality of the encoding, is what already happens with audio files... Only audio is smaller, demands less processing and it is more difficult to say if your files' quality are exagerated or not... So usually we just move them without thinking. Will it be the same with video in the future? (or right now?)

Re: Best Handheld for playing back high res/bitrate videos?
 

Personally, after looking around at different options, I really doubt this will be the case. 1920 x 1080 resolution with High bitrate will piratically bring any handheld to it knees. Note to mention there ton of different video format (x264, xvid, etc) + containers (mkv, mp4, avi, etc) it will be hard find support for it all. One of reason I hardly watch videos on handheld is because it isn't as easy as much copying any video file on it them.

Re: Best Handheld for playing back high res/bitrate videos?
 

I just tried out the Media Player Classic - Home Cinema you mentioned with x264 videos. The CPU usage is still high.

I looked at around doom9 forums and I see a lot of problems with x264 decoding using hardware acceleration. For example see this thread:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=132924

Note I didn't spend much time on this since I really don't need it on my PC. I got a fast CPU for very reason I don't trust any hardware acceleration to work easily out there :D Too bad handheld don't have fast CPUs, though ....

Re: Best Handheld for playing back high res/bitrate videos?
 

Take a look at the Viliv S5. I can verify that it plays 720p just fine but personally have not tried 1080p. Over at pocketables, people are claiming 1080p with no problem. Other than that, it is an awesome umpc, and very capable. Only problem is that it runs windows xp and no linux support at this time, although people are busy hacking.

Re: Best Handheld for playing back high res/bitrate videos?
 

Get a Archos 5 IMT. I also had a N800 (prior to the unit being stolen) and was also grossly disgusted with the video playback performance. I recently picked up a Archos 5 120 Gig IMT and the video playback is impressive. Check it out. BTW... I'm writing this on my Archos!