This can be a complicated subject so, please read the post before deciding to commit to an answer or response since it's so easy to just say "Well, install this app and you're golden" which - at least at this moment as I'm typing this - is an impossible situation since no such app exists (and I swear, if I could code one up I would but I have effectively nil coding/programming skills).
And this is a long post too so, please, don't crap it with the tl;dr style responses. I'm not the only person this info or a potential app could benefit, there are many many people looking for exactly what I'm asking about. Could even be some money in the project if anyone cares to potentially create such an app, given the constraints and requirements. That's all covered in the main post below, so thanks for taking the time to read even these first two paragraphs.
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Ok, the question basically is this: what is the difficulty in creating an Android-based video player - one that works obviously on Android-powered devices - that can read embedded subs of some kind, be it ASS/SUB/SRT, or even VobSub (hey, I'm just tossing it out there) streams in video files, most notably MP4 containers and yes MKV as well?
I've always been curious as to why it seems - that's it seems to be an extraordinarily difficult thing to accomplish. And just for the record, here's why I ask:
My Wife is deaf, has been since birth, and she does love watching her movies and TV shows (from our rather-too-damned-large DVD collection) but because she's deaf the process of getting videos encoded in a portable format (easy to do with HandBrake, like point-click-encode-done) but also being able to include/encode the subs (or even the CC/closed captions) into the files instead of having to go through all the trouble of locating an ASS/SUB/SRT file to accompany that video.
Now, I understand subs, captions, ASS/SUB/SRT/etc formats quite well. I've been using HandBrake and many many other video encoding tools for the better part of 2 decades now (seriously, but that means video compression and encoding of many different kinds over the years, not just HandBrake, etc - I know it hasn't been around that long, or most other tools we commonly use - I mean my experience with digital video formats), but to this day there's just nothing for Android that can read embedded subtitle streams of any kind and if anyone can say why I'd sure love to know.
I'm not asking from the perspective of "GOD DAMMIT WHY CAN'T SOMEONE DO THIS?!?!?!" so please, don't take it offensively - I'm asking because I seriously want to know what the difficulty is. I've got several "How to" types of books about Android, several beginner's books for learning how to create Android apps, etc (hit up a B&N recently with a few hundred bucks in gift certificates I had and grabbed a handful of various Android development/programming books because I believe it's a damned good OS only getting better).
I'm not saying I'll ever be the one that cracks this particular problem, of course, but if anyone can point out or give me some nugget to start with on why it seems (again with the seems thing) to be so damned tough to do. If there was just one video player out there - and right now my hands down favorite is MX Video Player, free on the Market, and pretty awesome overall - that could read subs embedded in MP4/MKV containers I swear, I'd physically stand up from this chair and jump for joy, I kid you not.
But anyway... I've been doing the typical (and only method I'm aware of) process of ripping a DVD to the hard drive, encoding to a format my devices can handle (I chose a somewhat future proof resolution of 800 pixels wide (I own an HTC HD2 so that's native, and the vertical resolution is dependent on the video aspect ratio, with AAC audio, using h.264 encoding for the video stream) and embed the subs inside the container (my container of choice for the HD2 is MP4), but of course nothing can ever read the subs.
Which means that another step is required: the long somewhat tedious task of using a tool like DVDSubEdit to "rip" the sub images and then do OCR on them which is pretty much never ever even close to being accurate, which means more time spent fixing up all the booboos in the OCR text, then saving THAT file as an SRT and then being able to have MX Video Player or most any other Android video player be able to play the video file and read the SRT to display those subs.
*phew* It's a chore just typing the process out too.
So... does anyone have an answer, or a specific reason as to why Android video players can't do this? Is there a limitation in Android itself that stops any video players from reading additional streams inside video containers other than the audio and video streams only? That's my guess, that there's some kind of limitation on what the video player is allowed to access, but I am 100% guesstimating on that one - I'm quite positive I'm wrong so, you're free to point out that yes, I'm wrong if you like.
But, it sure would be nice considering I can create near-perfect files for portable devices including the HD2, any Android tablet, the Nook Color, etc etc with fantastic image quality, great audio quality, and embedded subs taken directly from the source material itself... it just seems - yes, I said it again, sorry - like there's no hope.
"Help me, XDA... you're my only hope..."
Ok, it's corny, sue me.
But if anyone cares to chime in, or has some advice that is useful and constructive and not just tell me go install yet another Android video player that doesn't actually do what I'm attempting to do, I'm liste--- errr... reading.
Thanks for your time, and if you read this far, I salute you. Have fun, always...
Hello, I honestly don't know why Android can't read embedded subs (such as ASS/SRT in MKV) but I see you're used to encode/decode/recode stuff: now, why don't you HARDCODE subs into the video? I know it takes some time, but you'd have subs "engraved" into video stream and therefore only one audio and one video stream to decode. Hope I made myself clear.
That's easy, and yes I can do that with HandBrake or straight x264 CLI work, but... I'm not deaf, my Wife is.
Sometimes I actually do like using the subtitles or captions, depending on the movie and the amount of noise/etc in a given scene (the captions make it easier to comprehend what the characters are saying, obviously), but I personally don't leave them enable intentionally so... that's why I'd like to embed them (or use files that I've already created for my Wife that are for use on the PC and can be played on the HD2 or whatever device we happen to get) so that I can enable them - or she can - as required and I can disable them so they're not "in the way" when I'm watching something just by myself.
Hope that's clear...
Questions or Problems Should Not Be Posted in the Development Forum
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Moving to Q&A
Related
Hello
I wonder what program/codec pack I should use to be able to watch the films that I watch on my computer. On my PC I use Media Player Classic with K-lite codec pack and I can watch mostly all film formats, including .flv and stuff. On my HTC I can hardly watch anything. I currently have Core Media Player and Windows media Player on my phone. What do I miss?
Thanks!
Mne
Try This...
I've used this for over a year now. It's not designed specifically for the Rose, but it works - that's all that matters!
Set the output resolution to VGA (640x480) and they will play fine. You can play the converted videos with HTC Album, no special codecs, or additional software required. I use it to converted .avi and .flv, but I'm sure it will convert a lot more than just those two formats
On my S710 (not tried on my S740) I use PocketTV Classic (free one) or TCPMP (Core Media Player) depending on the file type. Either is 100x better than Windows Media Player for any video I've tried but as grahamkdt pointed out you should use a utility to convert the source videos to a phone-friendly format: type (diff compression types require more or less CPU usage & may only work with certain players), resolution (pref match your screen res) and bit-rates that your media & phone can keep up so it's not choppy. Once you optimize video files & try a few players you should be able to get some pretty decent playback on a Rose considering I was able to on my old S710 which has a lot less power.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=636423 this is the tcpmp build i use for some months, the best one i tried, i hate converting videos but this plays most my videos without needing any conversion
Elusivo said:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=636423 this is the tcpmp build i use for some months, the best one i tried, i hate converting videos but this plays most my videos without needing any conversion
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Cool thanks, hadn't seen that version.
As far as converting, why make your phone work harder than it has to & waste a ton of space on your storage card when you can just spend a few minutes converting videos to optimize for your phone? Especially with super fast computers these days it doesn't take a few seconds to a few minutes now. Of course you wouldn't convert in certain circumstances (like if the original wasn't very hi-res to start with) especially if you're only going to watch it once & delete to free up space but if you plan to keep it why not shrink it down and have it play even smoother? Besides they copy over usb or onto flash a lot faster when they're smaller. Plus not sure any phone can handle HD let alone blueray yet and who'd waste the space if it could.
haha yes i know bill, but in my case, unfortunately, i suffer from a serious case of laziness and procrastination so i just can't really be bothered with getting more programs and go through all the work to convert stuff, i dun even convert the ones that i want but can't watch on the mobile lol those that i want but can't i just watch them on the computer and curse my mobile with some nasty words
Is it something I'm missing or can we not play drm video files on the atrix?
Sent from my MB860 using XDA App
are you asking about playing files that still have DRM protection intact? Did you really expect it to? You would need an app that has the right DRM privileges to play them. What exactly are you trying to play?
Can't play movies/videos downloaded from iTunes even though you paid for them.
They will sync over, but not play.
Sorry - was a bit brief
Was posting from my phone so didn't explain enough there...
I have a DVD with DRM digital content. I activated it with Windows Media Player on my PC so it plays just fine there. I then went to try and sync the file to get it over to my phone but WMP just comes back and says the phone doesn't support DRM.
Followed some directions here:
http://tsukata.org/2010/08/31/how-to-use-playsforsure-droidx/
Says it works on some phones and not others. Looks like you need "PlaysforSure" and I was just wondering if anyone had any experience with that yet on thier Atrix.
If it's not possible, then I'm looking for suggestions on the best way/settings/program to port a DVD over to my phone.
Android supports some DRM schemes, but not the MS WMA/V formats. "PlaysForSure" is also a MS format which you'll never see on Android devices.
There are plenty of ways for ripping DVDs (and BDs now for that matter) to the PC (ignoring any bonus 'Digital Copy' discs). From there you can reencode and transfer it all you want. Not all methods are easy to use, and in any case that's not a topic for this forum .. Google is your friend (DVD ripping and transcoding would be good search terms to start with).
Now, a more relevant question (which I haven't gotten to researching myself yet) would be:
- What file formats does Android in general, and the ATRIX in particular, support out of the box?
- What other formats can be played by installing third-party players or codecs?
DVDFab is a great program I use to rip my blu-rays since the included digital copies have incompatible DRM Schemes. The nice thing about that app is that it works with Nvidia Cuda which uses the graphics card to help transcode the video. I just select the iPhone setting and the videos look great on my Atrix coming off of blu-rays. (have not tried it with any dvds as I did not pruchase the dvd portion of it).
Well this is actually a topic with 2 quetions in it.
1) Did you guys already notice when playing a movie on the Prime, and you connected the prime to a tv through a microHDMI cable the subtitles shown on the Prime, do not show up on the television. It looks like the prime only sends the pure video signal to the tv and not the extra's such as subtitles. Is there some kind of workaroud for this? I've tried both DicePlayer as MX Video Player without any succes.
2) This is the main question. What program do you guys use, and which settings, to convert movies you've downloaded or ripped? I know the Prime plays a lot of formats, but the main reason for asking is that most downloaded movies are rather big files (over 10Gb). So I want to make them smaller in size. So which program do you recommand for that, and which which settings?
Personally I've tried two programs:
- XMedia Recode. Ideal program because it has already a lot of pre-settings in it, also one for the Asus Transformer. But the outcome file is quite grainy.
- MediaCoder. A lot can be adjusted, but no presets. And from a quick comparison, I think the outcome file is not really nice to look at. Lot's of distortion, blocks, etc.
So please advice.
Google DVD Catalyst
So far it's hasn't met a DVD or video file it didn't like.
Transformer Prime presets at different quality settings.
I've been using it for a while, it's great.
Ok I will try that. But does it also hard encode the subtitles, so the subtitles are show on the Tv when the prime is connected through microHDMI to the tv?
10GBs? Where you getting your movies from !? I use 720p BluRay Rips that are around 2Gbs or less
This is for personal watching on the prime not using TV.
I use various torrent sites to get my HD TV Shows to watch at work
I also MX player to play movies that the stock player wont play
I download movies for watching on the tv, but sometimes, eg, when I'm in the nighshift, I want to convert them to 720p movies.
I also watch older movies which are not always in 720p, or not even in X264 format, but only in DVD format.
And because I'm living in the Netherlands, not everybody encodes the movies in 720p with dutch subtitles but only in 1080p. So that's why.
But then is there still the problem that the Prime does not show the subtitles on the tv. The only way to see the subtitles I think, is when they are hard coded in the movie.
Not sure about DVD Catalyst and hard coding them but Tools4movies is great about answering email. They should be able to tell you if it's possible or not. My laptop is down for the count right now or I'd look at the many settings this program has to see if its a possibility.
From Tools4movies website:
Tools4Movies was founded in late 2003. While initially developed as a basic video conversion utility, in the middle of 2004, the
first version of DVD Catalyst was released under the name of mMedia.
mMedia consisted of 2 separate applications called mDVD and mVideo. mVideo was the continuation of an in-home build video
conversion utility, and mDVD was essentially a modified version to enable DVD support.
After a few months of continuous development, mMedia was replaced with PocketDVD 1.0, which initially hold onto the 2 separate
applications, but with later versions, both were merged into a single application to make better use of the powerful batching capabilities
that the applications offered. The first name change, from mMedia to PocketDVD was decided on due for marketing reasons.
After a few successful version-upgrades, and PocketDVD 2.0 winning the Smartphone and Pocket PC Magazine Best Software Awards, a
new name change was needed because we were receiving too many support requests for applications with a similar name. While initially
beneficial (we do answer all emails within a very reasonable response time, even if it was not for our own application) we found it better
to have a more distinctive look and name to avoid confusion. As we at DVD Catalyst are cat-persons (well, 1 cat and 2 yorkies at the
moment), we decided to use distinctive cat-eyes in the graphical design, and of course DVD CATalyst as a name.
DVD Catalyst was born out of our own personal needs. After looking around the web for an application to assist us with putting movies
on our portable devices, we found that there was nothing on the market that would easily enable us to start a conversion with more than
just one DVD track or video file. On top of that, all available software treated DVDs and video files as being different, basically forcing you
to purchase 2 products for essentially doing the same thing.
So rather than settling for a multi-app solution, we started development on something that would do what we want; Rip multiple DVDs,
convert numerous video files, and provide us with all the control over the conversion we could ever need.
Unlike most video-conversion-app developers out there, we actually use our own software on a daily basis. Whenever we run into
something we would like it to do, we build it into our software.
Coming from a history of support-jobs, we actually listen to our customers. Besides providing the best possible support, we are also
always open for suggestions. We do come up with ideas and new features ourselves, but customer suggestions and feature requests has
made DVD Catalyst what it is today.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
for video conversions I like using the program "super"
www.erightsoft.com/S6Kg1.html
Download link is at the bottom of the page.
Sent from my SPH-D710 using Tapatalk
Bart1981 said:
Ok I will try that. But does it also hard encode the subtitles, so the subtitles are show on the Tv when the prime is connected through microHDMI to the tv?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hi Bart,
DVD Catalyst will hard-code the subs into your video files.
If you have any questions, just send me an email or PM. If it makes it easier, I can reply in Dutch if needed.
^^^
See this is why these guys are the B-E-S-T!!!!
I've tried DVD Catalyst, and wow, it's amazingly fast!
I'm impressed bij the simplicity and the quality!
dvdcatalyst said:
Hi Bart,
DVD Catalyst will hard-code the subs into your video files.
If you have any questions, just send me an email or PM. If it makes it easier, I can reply in Dutch if needed.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Gna gna, that makes it a lot easier ;-)
2. I use xilisoft video converter ultimate. The PS3 HD h.264 profile works perfectly.
Sent from my Transformer Prime TF201 using Tapatalk
When trying to send a video through mms to an iPhone all they get is the audio and a blank scree. I have the camcorder set to limit for mms but I dont know what else to do.
yeah, same here. i want to know. anyone please answer his question would be appreciated.
I think the issue is with the iPhone. I have ZERO problems sending MMS to other Android phones across carriers but with the iPhone they fail.
The iPhone has so many limitations its laughable. there are many video and audio formats not supported by iOS--or, you need spend hours of your time searching the internet for 3rd party software that can convert them.
for example, the iPhone is supposed to be able to play .mp4 but most of the time I have to convert them--TO MP4 !!! to get iTunes to allow me to add it to my iPhone 4 (and all other versions of iPhone Ive had)
One of the reasons I switched to Android, I can use it as I want.
I use whatsapp, you could send anything you want.. Other app is chatOn from samsung its available for both plataforms..
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I717 using Tapatalk
Smash the iPhone and tell them to get an Android. Haha. I kid, I kid.
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I717 using Tapatalk
The issue is indeed with the iphone and it's supported files. First you must understand that MP4 is a container file, not just a video format. A container file holds several items, primarily Video and Audio. An MP4 may have 3GP, MKV, AVI and a plethora of other formats. Same for audio. What the user is experiencing is the iPhone doing the best it can with it's limited support. it is running the MP4 and finding only supported audio files, and not video. When you start using handbrake or format factory, you begin to understand how all this works. It really isn't too hard once you get your head wrapped around it, but until you do it's a little complicated. The links below, specifically the first one, should do the trick for this. This is very important if you every want successfully watch movies on mobile devices or run a home media server such as plex. I run a Win2008 Server with a Plex server running from that. I stream to alot of different devices both on local network and outside my home while traveling and to family. it took alot of reading and understanding to come up with just the right compressions and containers to do the job without offering duplicates for each device.
Some reading:
Basics to understand what we're discussing-
http://www.pcworld.com/article/213612/all_about_video_codecs_and_containers.html
A little more detailed-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_container_format
I found that if I use GoSMS and use the Go Message Capture video that you can capture and send a video to an iPhone. FYI
Hello, this problem has been bugging me for a loong time, since my first android phone.
When I first had my HTC Hero, I found about android's DLNA capabilities and it was pretty
amazing that I could stream music and pictures to my tv, even videos in some rare occasions but
actual on-the-fly transcoding was completely impossible. Now skip ahead to my third phone, ZTE Blade III.
1Ghz and 512mb ram is quite good for what I need and I was hoping that it could transcode some poor-quality
videos I film with my phone. Why? Well, my TV has pretty small range of supported video formats and of course
that my phone records video in the unsupported format. I tried a wide varety of DLNA apps and none of them
had anything to do with transcoding. I tried twonky, skifta, bubbleupnp... No result.
Why is this so taboo? I understand if the file is in full HD but Blade III records in VGA. It shouldn't be a problem
to transcode or am I mistaken?
tl;dr need app that can transcode files in real time and send them to my tv (something like wmp but on android)
If you have a solution or idea, please share it with me and everybody else here :good:
Upgraded from blade iii to optimus l7 ii and now bumping the thread.
I know what you mean, I've had no luck getting Twonky to do transcoding, I can't find any documentation anywhere! It's driving me nuts!
I've had the most luck with PS3 Media Server. Don't be fooled by the name, it doesn't just work with PS3. It can use FFMPEG, MEncoder and VLC as transcoders, and supports realtime muxing with tsmuxer. If one of the transcoders does not play ball (for example VLC is better with corrupt files than the others from experience), there is a good chance the others will. It also supports burning in subtitles which I find really useful as I like watching foreign films. You can select which transcoder you want to use from the client itself, which is really handy!
I will try it ASAP, thanks a lot!
[EDIT]
I can't find "PS3 Media Server" on Google Play, mind sharing the link?