DivX on Android? (Spica)

[Paul22000]

the Galaxy Spica features an AMOLED touchscreen display, 3.2 megapixel camera, DivX support (a first for Android), 3.5mm headphone jack and an 800MHz processor.

http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2009/11/16/samsung-announces-the-galaxy-spica-i5700/


Why only on this phone? Does anyone know if DivX support is software-based or hardware-based (meaning it will never come to G1)?

[coina]

Surely its just a software codec?

Noone uses divx anymore anyway :P

[Paul22000]

Surely its just a software codec?

Noone uses divx anymore anyway :P

Yeah, I would normally think it's software. But it if is, how the heck have we had Android for more than a year now and no one has been able to get DivX support yet aside from these guys? It just leaves me scratching my head... Seriously... :confused:

(And DivX versus Xvid etc; it doesn't matter to me. I just want SOME way to be able to play avi files without have to do all the ridiculously annoying conversion crap.)

I'm betting it's a hardware thing. Otherwise, why hasn't someone done this earlier?

Anyone know for sure how Samsung is doing it?

[coina]

well even if android supported divx you'd still need to convert the videos to the native screen resolution or smaller.

so there are two issues - software (codec availability) and hardware, i.e. having the cpu spec to down-res files with a spatial resolution greater than the devices screen.

i'm betting just because this handset supports divx playback, it doesn't mean it will play all your downloaded tv and movies without you needing to manually downconvert for a smaller spatial resolution.

[Paul22000]

well even if android supported divx you'd still need to convert the videos to the native screen resolution or smaller.

so there are two issues - software (codec availability) and hardware, i.e. having the cpu spec to down-res files with a spatial resolution greater than the devices screen.

i'm betting just because this handset supports divx playback, it doesn't mean it will play all your downloaded tv and movies without downconverting spatial resolution.

Not really, it should play automatically regardless of screen resolution.

My old Samsung SCH-i730 played any avi files I threw at it, regardless of size. Looked great on PC, looked great on my phone.

Man, that's the one thing I miss so badly about Windows Mobile. I could drag and drop ANY video file I had and BAM, played instantly.

[coina]

it is the hardware specs of the g1 preventing playback of files that have a larger spatial resolution than that of the handset itself.

[Paul22000]

it is the hardware specs of the g1 preventing playback of files that have a larger spatial resolution than that of the handset itself.

Are you saying that the G1 is not powerful enough to play these files adequately (meaning, it could run but with low framerate etc), or that there's something intrinsically not present in the G1 hardware wise (hardware video decoder etc) so that it will never be possible to even OPEN these types of files?

[coina]

i can't answer that with authority until the divx codec is running on a g1 and you try to play a scene release sized avi i guess?

but yeah, i am pretty certain that regardless of what codec a video is, it won't play if it's above the g1 screens native res.

[JaceMan]

but yeah, i am pretty certain that regardless of what codec a video is, it won't play if it's above the g1 screens native res.

Not so. Simply watching YouTube videos in HQ disproves that theory.

[coina]

youtube hq and youtube hd are different, and you can't play youtube hd on g1. youtube hq is the same spatial resolution as normal youtube but with less compression, its not any larger in a spatial respect like youtube hd is.

[JaceMan]

youtube hq and youtube hd are different, and you can't play youtube hd on g1. youtube hq is the same spatial resolution as normal youtube but with less compression, its not any larger in a spatial respect like youtube hd is.

I don't believe that is correct. Not all videos on YouTube are available in HQ. Standard definition on YouTube is 320x240 which the YouTube player scales up to 480x360 in the browswer window which makes the video quality degraded. When playing a video that is capable of being displayed in HQ it displays natively at 480x360 without scaling. 480x360 is higher resolution than the G1's native 320x480.

[coina]

touche.

where does the frame size limitation of the g1 video player come in then jaceman? because one defintely exists.

[JaceMan]

If there is a specific limitation (resolution and not processing power) I don't know what it is. My educated guess would be that if YouTube HQ (480x360) doesn't match the G1's limits, the next logical stop would be 640x480 VGA playback limitation. But as the G1's native resolution is only 320x480, I wouldn't bother encoding anything at a higher resolution than 480 (width) as you really wouldn't gain anything except larger file size.

If the question is: what to encode at? Then it would be foolish to go beyond 480x360 as it would be a waste. If the question is: will it play this video I downloaded? I'd have to answer with: 'Try it and see.'

[extorian]

Just my 2p worth here...

A few months ago I was reading a T-Mobile G1 transcoding thread I'd stumbled upon, while Googling something else Android related, which just caught my attention briefly. They were discussing the command-line parameters to pass to some transcoding software on Linux to transcode AVIs into a suitable format for playback on a G1.

The outcome boiled down to two formats:

427 x 320 x 30fps (or fps of original if less) for 4:3 content.
480 x 270 x 30fps (or fps of original if less) for 16:9 content.

In both cases, as JaceMan pointed out, you're not going above the G1's native resolution (which would be pointless).

It's also worth noting that the G1 can play HQ YouTube videos very well. The lowest HQ YouTube quality (of which there are 3 types), uses MPEG4, which is essentially what DivX is. So I would assume the overhead of DivX decoding would be similar.

However, I do not know which of the HQ formats the G1 chooses to use. The higher quality of the three HQ formats YouTube uses is FLV - which could be anything wrapped in Flash - I've not bothered to check.