vlc-android on Xoom - much slower than stock player

[vladimir19444]

Hi!

I have built vlc-android successfully with NEON option - it builds like a charm, many thanks to all developers involved! However, it turns out that the greatest Android tablet - Motorola Xoom - does not have NEON instruction set enabled in its processor. What a shame! So I rebuilt the app with NO_NEON=1 option and it works on Xoom, but very slow, much slower than a stock player that came with the tablet. What could be the problem and is it possible to improve the speed? I love VLC, and on the desktop it is faster than any other player. Could it be that the reason for sluggishness is the debug mode build instead of release? The app builds as VLC-debug.apk, so it is apparently a debug build. Would it be faster if I would build it in release mode? If so, how would I do that? What flags or options should I modify?

Please advise,
Vladimir

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Because the stock player has access to hardware decoding.

[vladimir19444]

Thanks, Jean, for a quick reply. Since Android is an open source operating system, is it possible that in the future VLC will also have access to the same hardware decoding tools? And will any optimization help here in the mean time? I know that in desktop version some modules of VLC use i386 assembly language to improve the performance. Is the same possible for ARM? Would release build be any faster?

Please advise,

Vladimir

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Maybe, it will. We don't know yet.