No smoothing

[arromdee]

I have two tablets. One is an Insignia Flex (which has a cracked screen so I bought a new tablet, however, at this poiint the cracked screen is a cosmetic problem only). It runs Android 4.0.3. The second tablet is a Le Pan II, running Android 4.0.4. The tablets have very similar hardware. Both of them are running vlc with the same deblocking and chroma setting, and with hardware acceleration off. (Changing any of those settings doesn't fix the problem anyway.) Both tablets are running the 6/30 nightly build of ARMv7 Neon VLC.

On the first tablet, a video plays properly. The example I used was
http://people.videolan.org/~jb/android_ ... 5_1500.mp4 .

On the second tablet, playing this or any other video results in the 320 pixels being enlarged to fit the screen, but with no smoothing, so I see large blocky pixels. The video smoothed properly on the first tablet.

vlc has this problem but other players such as MX Player or XBMC play properly, with smoothing.

Logcat -d on Le Pan II (non-working): http://www.rahul.net/arromdee/log1.txt
Same, with grep -i vlc: http://www.rahul.net/arromdee/log2.txt
Logcat -d on Insignia Flex (working): http://www.rahul.net/arromdee/log3.txt
Same, with grep -i vlc: log4.txt in same directory.

[edwardw]

Perhaps the tablets have different screen resolutions?

[arromdee]

Both tablets have the same resolution, 1024x768.

[arromdee]

I tried the earliest debug beta available, which was 5/13. It had the same problem. So did the most recent (July 3).

I already posted the logcat output. Is there any other information that you want that might be helpful in figuring this out?

[edwardw]

I didn't notice anything weird in the logcat. Perhaps some screenshots?

[arromdee]

The screenshot looks just like you'd expect 320 pixels enlarged to something less than 768 would look: each image pixel is about two screen pixels in width. The 720p version of the video doesn't show the same type of problem, of course.

It turns out that when I set MX Player to software decoding, it also shows the same problem. So does Wondershare Player. They both work correctly on the other tablet. This tends to suggest it is a tablet problem after all. On the other hand, XBMC still works properly on both tablets, and I don't think it uses any hardware decoding at all.

It also turns out that although the tablets are similar, they don't use the same graphics chipset, so they're actually not similar in the relevant way. The Insignia Flex is similar to the Le Pan S, not the II.

Here's the OpenGL info from each tablet:
http://www.rahul.net/arromdee/opengl.working.txt
http://www.rahul.net/arromdee/opengl.notworking.txt
Is there anything suspiciously missing in the one that doesn't work?

[edwardw]

So far, VLC uses Androidsurface on Android to render video. OpenGL is still a work in progress.

[arromdee]

Is there something I can run to determine if there are any missing AndroidSurface capabilities then?

[edwardw]

Not that I know of. Androidsurface is a part of the Android system.

[arromdee]

Is there some kind of android test program which I can run and have it just try smoothing and see if it works?

[edwardw]

Is there some kind of android test program which I can run and have it just try smoothing and see if it works?

Yes, it's called VLC

[aneeskhan]

can anyone guide me how do i install VLC player on my cell phone i have Nokia Lumia 800 please ??

[edwardw]

can anyone guide me how do i install VLC player on my cell phone i have Nokia Lumia 800 please ??

You don't; the Nokia Lumia 800 does not run Android.

[arromdee]

Discovery:

If I pause the file and then use the two arrow icon at the lower right to change the aspect ratio, for some reason, when I change the aspect ratio to "fit vertical" (and only that--not "fit horizontal", "4:3", or "16:9") then the smoothing now works.

Furthermore:
-- If I then let the onscreen display fade away, the picture remains smoothed.
-- If I then touch the picture instead (thus causing the onscreen display to go away immediately without fading) the picture is no longer smoothed
-- When I try this on another video whose original aspect ratio is different, I find that the other video has this behavior with "fit vertical" instead of "fit horizontal". In fact, it seems to give me smoothing with whichever of "fit horizontal" or "fit vertical" causes some of the picture to go off screen

Does this information suggest the cause of the problem?

[XilasZ]

VLC doesn't do resizing or smoothing, it relies on android (and the hardware) to do that.
VLC sends 480x320 frames on a 1024x768 surface (or something like that depending on the setting), android should do what is necessary to resize properly.

But i remember we had something like that a few weeks ago, it has been fixed since, can you retry with latest nightly build ?

[arromdee]

I get the same problemr with the 8/8 nightly, including the behavior where I do get smoothing if I use the wrong aspect ratio.

As some other players also have the problem, I wonder if the tablet just has a buggy video driver. (Although XBMC for some reason does not have the problem.)

[XilasZ]

As some other players also have the problem, I wonder if the tablet just has a buggy video driver. (Although XBMC for some reason does not have the problem.)

That may be the answer, i don't think we can do anything to fix that.