Hello, I originally posted this on r/androidquestions on reddit but received no responses in well over a couple of months. Thought I'd try my luck here even though I never get replies. ;p
I got this weird issue on all my devices where after a certain point the video freezes, buffers for ~8 seconds, plays for a couple and repeat. This is not video specific and changing the quality does not fix this, it just makes the problem appear later on. In HQ quality, after about 1:45 minutes of playing flawlessly it starts buffering the whole damn time. SQ quality can play up to 3-4 minutes before any issues arise.
This is on a broad range of devices, both mine and those of friends. My own Samsung Galaxy S2 running CM10.1 and Cube U30GT running CM10, but had the issue on stock, and a stock Galaxy Note and HTC Hero 2.
Other info. It's not network related. Happens on both wifi and 3g and on different connections/ISPs. My own Internet connection clocks up to 20mbps and has no problem playing any YT video on my PC. Other "streaming" video stuff work great. Twitch.tv plays great as does dailymotion. Other players, other than the default YT app, have no issues playing videos even on HQ. YT through the browser works fine but somehow doesn't let me switch to HQ and the "UI" generally feels bad. Feedly (which is great btw), has a sort of plugin that uses the YT app to play videos natively. Any videos played in the feedly app, using this "plugin" play great even in HQ, which is weird. I've tried reinstalling, uninstalling, stalling, killing, maiming, clearing data+cache, completely wiping the devices and sacrificing firstborns to Lucifer.
This feels like a caching issue of the youtube app. It feels like it starts caching up to a point (playing great in the process) and at some points cache fills up and starts deleting in order to make space to cache further. That leads to the pause and buffering of the video.
Has anyone else experienced issues like this and has managed to fix them? Does anyone techsavvy enough know if it's indeed a cache issue and how to bypass it?
bumping.
Seriously, I've never got a reply to any of my threads.
Isn't news. YouTube app sucks. I have an iPhone and frequent Apple forums quite often and its preferred to use the YouTube web app or 3rd party app over the actual app. Just getting throttled. My biggest gripe with Androids YouTube app is there is no way for it to use SD as the default resolution.
I just tried the WiFi optimization with no effect. If I wait a couple hours it will stream HD no problem once network traffic slows down. I have a 30 mbs home connection which I can get those speeds easily, usually much higher, but not to a YouTube server between 3pm - 11pm.
Related
I've searched thoroughly on this and no solutions, only a few other users reporting the same problem.
Got a TV, Blu-ray player, or network media player that supports DLNA? Can you record a video on your Vibrant, and successfully play it on your client device? I think I saw someone say they had success using a WD Live HD Plus...but I'd sure like to get confirmation before I go get one.
I picked up a Samsung BD-C6900 player that ought to do this. Getting the networking set up on both the phone and the blu-ray went extremely smoothly. The Avatar trailer plays over DLNA perfectly. But videos recorded with the phone's camera? No go. They play for a second or two, then freeze, then sometimes pick up again, much farther into the clip, then freeze again. Even on the smallest resolution.
The C6900 is going back, unless I get some satisfaction from level three support in the morning...by the time I got that far tonight, the department had closed for the day.
So maybe I try the WD, or wait until some future time when Samsung finally gets around to doing the engineering that should have been done before releasing product, and spreading hype about Allshare that crosses the fine line from fraud into marketing.
Any other experiences or ideas?
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Update 10/1/2010 5PM MT:
Amie at level 3 support did not have any solutions, but was conscientious in taking down the data to relay to development.
I discovered that turning off "record audio" results in videos that play through allshare correctly, excepting the highest resolution mode. Even though they play correctly, there is a notice at the beginning: "Audio codec not support". This notice also sometimes briefly appears at the start of the malfunctioning videos that do contain audio.
I've copied the videos over to Ubuntu and used mplayer -identify to start analyzing them. Nothing jumps out as suspicious. In both cases, the audio format ID is 255 and mplayer selects the FAAD AAC codec. Mplayer plays them all fine.
I tried Twonky Mobile Server in addition to allshare, and it behaved similarly to allshare. It produced a log file in which the most interesting difference between avatar_trailer and the recorded videos is that DLNA profiles were found for the malfunctioning videos, but no profile was found for the Avatar trailer.
I wonder if something is triggering on-the-fly transcoding to happen, even though it should not be needed? On-the-fly transcoding is something that can happen under DLNA, so that broader compatibility can be achieved. It's going to be slow, though, on these embedded processors. Slowness due to transcoding would be consistent with the symptoms. I don't know whether such transcoding would happen on the server end (phone in this case), or the client end. Anyone, anyone? Bueller?
My next experiment will be to burn the videos to disc and see what the C6900 does with them in that case.
Update 10/1/2010 10PM MT: All the videos play fine when burned to disc. So it's purely an allshare issue...but is it on the phone end, or the BD player end? I checked back and found the source of the report that the WD Live worked with DLNA from a Vibrant...but it was not claimed that videos recored using the Vibrant's camera worked. So I have never seen any report of anyone ever playing their Vibrant-recorded videos using DLNA/allshare. Seems like something amiss on the phone end, then...but why, if the video files themselves are OK, do two different DLNA server apps (allshare and Twonky) both fail in the same way?
Next experiment: stream to Windows 7 as the DLNA client.
I would like to capture the DLNA streams, but am not sure how to go about that.
Mods: I see you moved this to Q&A. I think perhaps it would be a better fit in Development, now?
Tried flashing a different ROM, Frankin-Twiz Final. It has allshare removed. TwonkyServer Mobile had Unrecoverable Error on startup. So I restored to stock.
(someone has since posted a dlna.apk in that thread that restores allshare)
I had to reinstall Twonky after flashing back to stock, and after that, it worked better! There must have been an update to it in the interim...
Still not perfect; there are pauses every few seconds, but it resumes from the right spot.
My best guess is that an on-the-fly transcode is happening due to the unusual 32k audio sample rate of the camcorder videos. The client device probably doesn't support that rate over dlna. I bet some client devices do, and would play the videos smoothly.
Hopefully a firmware update for the BD-C6900 player will come along that fixes it.
I acquired a Western Digital Live Plus HD player at Best Buy for $99. With the Vibrant running TwonkyServer Mobile, the WD plays all videos perfectly, even 720p!
I didn't try allshare--no reason to bother, and I like how Twonky stays running in the background and lets you do other things on the phone.
The C6900 is boxed up ready to go back to the store.
Greetings from Portugal.
Before I start, yes, I have tried searching for it. Found a couple of old threads that didn't help much...
My question is: Is there a way to watch any video format without it stopping every few minutes?
If I use the stock player everything is fine, but it cannot support several video formats like avi, rmvb... etc. I use the MX player, but on some types of video, it stopps every few minutes. It's sooooo annoying!
From what i've seen in some threads, it happens with other video apps too. AND, when i am watching something directly from the internet, like fastpasstv, the video stops loading also every few minutes. I have to restart the loading from the middle... not hard, but also annoying. (using stock browser, and this doesn't happen on youtube for example)
Is the issue related? Since it seems to be happening to both online and offline video viewing...
I am stock, non-rooted, and non-unlocked... Wifi is fine.
I have the same problem. But it is a MX Player specific one for me. BS Player works fine (but has other issues).
Edit: I tried with the 'Performance Mode' and it works so far. Maybe a workaround?
I never have this problem when streaming one of many video formats from my PC to my Prime using ES File Manager to find the video files on my PC and MX to play them as streams.
Is this something that you tend to experience with streams/videos being played directly on the Prime?
For me it is locally played .ts videos.
Meanwhile I found this thread http://groups.google.com/group/mx-videoplayer/browse_thread/thread/533d7296c0305183
It might be a Prime/ICS problem. There seems to be no solution up to now.
I get this same issue trying to stream video from sites other than youtube. It is when I'm streaming that I get most of the lock ups with the prime, reboots, etc. Maybe it is something to do with the allotted cache size of the browser being used up and cleared to make room for more buffered video?
It is rather annoying. You basically have to let it load and watch the whole thing as it goes. If I hit pause or so anything else then it risks stopping the stream where ever its at in the buffering. It's nice to have it start loading up, hitting pause, and walking away for a few minutes to let it buffer up. But then when I come back it would have just stopped about a 1/3 into it or 1/2 way. It would require hitting the reload button at the top or having to close the browser, kill it in the task manager, and then reopen it.
I don't have this issue with Netflix though. They did something right in their app.
I used to have this issue with mx player. It really sucked having to restart a movie every 5-10 minutes.
You want to use Dice Player. It's played everything I've thrown at it. All in Hardware rendering so the screen goes blank when plugged into HDMI.
Haven't had any issues since. I'm using the paid version, I assume they are both alright though.
[For UK Prime users, probably ] I've been trying to watch live Wimbledon on my Prime. I've tried several browsers (Opera, ICS, ICS+, Dolphin) but with little luck. The live steam starts OK, then it flashes black every few seconds (I'm pretty sure this is the BBC end ratcheting up the quality of the stream). It seems to settle, and it looks fantastic, but every few seconds, sometimes 5, sometimes 30, there are drop outs and buffering pauses. Anybody have any luck with streaming this on their Prime, or is it an 'issue'? (BTW, iplayer works fine in HD and SD).
I just tested this for you.
I did this by going to BBC News and then sports and clicking the live streams in multiple browsers.
As you say in Opera and Dolphin the video breaks up and buffers quite a lot so out of curiosity I tested it in the default browser that comes with the Prime. The page was slow to load initially but once I hit play it streamed perfectly and has been running by the side of me for 10 minutes with no buffering or artifacts or any problems at all.
Go figure, the worse browser of all actually works lol.
I think the system they are using for Wimbledon is still in some kind of testing mode for the Olympics. It seems to be constantly attempting to connect at the 3500 kbps rate but then dropping back down even when the signal is strong. A pity because the PQ is really excellent while it maintains the HD feeds.
That was my thought - but it plays fine on my lap-top, with only the odd buffering pause. On the ATP, whether with Stock Browser or several different options, the image breaks up every few seconds - it's like it can't maintain a fix. As said, it's not a problem with iplayer, but only with live streaming.
Yes, HD streams from iPlayer play great on stock browser.
And watching live streams from the iPlayer page is completely smooth - but of course only 1500 kbps 688x384 feeds are available from here. It seems 1280x720 is only available via the Sports web pages. I have noticed today too that most of the links are wrongly labelled!
Update: Watching the Federer match here tonight (accessed through the Sports site) - totally smooth HD live stream. Looks beautiful except for some reason full-screen leaves thin black bars left right and bottom.
So impressive that this thin little tablet can act "out of the box" as live HDTV .
I noticed that the videos in Youtube looked much better on my new phone then on the previous phone and thought that the Youtube app was defaulting to the HD stream (previous phone had really crappy WiMax, new phone is LTE @14Mbps even inside a large warehouse). After toggling it on and off to be sure it was indeed off, it appears that it still is using a higher bitrate stream probably because of the great LTE. What is strange though, is that last week, Youtube was averaging 150-200MB a day after watching a couple of videos. This week, after toggling HD on/off, it's nearly 3-4x as much and rapidly using up my data for the month. The "regular" stream also doesn't look that much different at all from the "HD" stream, so it could be it's stuck on the HD stream because of the high bandwidth my LTE connection has (or something else).
I want to use a lower quality stream to conserve my data, but have not been able to find any way to do so within the Youtube app, or via a Xposed module. Is there any way to choose the video size at all on a Android device? I'd prefer to stick with the stock Google Youtube app (via some external control/option?), but if I have to use some other app to do so I will.
Mpegger said:
I noticed that the videos in Youtube looked much better on my new phone then on the previous phone and thought that the Youtube app was defaulting to the HD stream (previous phone had really crappy WiMax, new phone is LTE @14Mbps even inside a large warehouse). After toggling it on and off to be sure it was indeed off, it appears that it still is using a higher bitrate stream probably because of the great LTE. What is strange though, is that last week, Youtube was averaging 150-200MB a day after watching a couple of videos. This week, after toggling HD on/off, it's nearly 3-4x as much and rapidly using up my data for the month. The "regular" stream also doesn't look that much different at all from the "HD" stream, so it could be it's stuck on the HD stream because of the high bandwidth my LTE connection has (or something else).
I want to use a lower quality stream to conserve my data, but have not been able to find any way to do so within the Youtube app, or via a Xposed module. Is there any way to choose the video size at all on a Android device? I'd prefer to stick with the stock Google Youtube app (via some external control/option?), but if I have to use some other app to do so I will.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Try Og Youtube its almost the same as youtube and much better it has many features like changing quality , downloading etc..
[MOD]OG YouTube 5.2.27
Hi guys,
How can I prevent the freeze I get after about 30m-1h? I've searched all over the web for an answer but to no avail. I use bubbleupnp to stream TV channels (m3u or m3u8) to chromecast with my samsung s8, and the streams almost always freeze, it kinda pauses (still pic, no sound) and I have to go back to my tv app and press play again for it to start again in real time.
I tried everything, tried changing various settings but they always freeze after about 1h or sometimes less. Sound and video start to either play out of sync or stutter sometimes and after 1 minute or so, everything just pauses and the stream is kinda dead. Sometimes the freeze just happens without any signs or warnings. Not all channels behave like this, but almost all do. I tried using vlc and they work fine. So it is 100% something with Bubbleupnp. I tried using a server, same thing. I did buy the license and made a battery rule for it so it's not that.
PLEASE HELP! Feels like i paid for something that doesn't work at all!
Bump
Can anybody respond lol?!