I have a very annoying problem, which is rather hard to explain in a few words, and so I haven't found anything similar on the net to help me.
I basically can not watch mp4 movies on my X10 mini (2.1) reliably. The movie starts by playing just fine, but after a while (often less than a minute) the video just randomly stops. This happens with every player I've tried, on any movie, streamed or from my sdcard.
After I exit the player any movie I try to watch afterwards will display the first frame only. I can seek inside the movie and can hear the audio perfectly, but i only get the first 1-2 video frames after a seek (if any). I have to restart my phone to be able to watch movies again (until it stops again).
The built-in YouTube App seems unaffected by this and works perfectly.
I understand that all video players have to use some built-in android media player back-end and my guess is that this back-end gets unrecoverably stuck at some point.
I'd like to know if there is a way to either restart the media player backend without having to restart the phone or to omit it's use entirely. (I haven't heard of a true standalone player so far)
We need more details about the video, I'm guessing the video itself is the problem. All you said was it was an mp4, that doesnt help at all. We need to know codec, resolution, bitrate, encoding settings, etc.
As a side note, all freshly downloaded video files would be simply gone after the required phone restart. While the video bug happens with direct streaming as well, this problem could still be related if there is some weird caching problem.
Last edited by santaranger; August 11th, 2011 at 11:04 AM.
Hmm, everything with the videos seems fine. They are all h264 baseline with cabac disabled, this is exactly what android needs. Perhaps your card is bad?
I think the videos are a bit too heavy for X10 mini. Particularly, the H264 Baseline L3.0 with 3 ref frames should require quite some calculations from CPU.
The advice here is to re-convert videos with more basic settings. The Handbrake Guide in my signature should produce such videos.
I narrowed it down to a player/codec crash. I've been watching .3gp movies and had a similar crash (though after a much longer time period). I force quit the player app, restarted it and continued watching .3gp movies with no obvious problems.
However after a while I noticed my phone getting warmer and warmer. I launched a monitoring app and saw I had constant 100% cpu load and no idea how to fix it but by restarting the phone. Remember this is the same workaround as for the non-working .mp4 movies.
So I'm guessing there IS something constantly crashing/looping within my media API which causes heavy cpu load. I further think the ramaining CPU time is sufficient for .3gp playback but not for the more sophisticated mp4 movies, which leads to the playback problems described in my OP.
The question remaining is how to stop these crashes from happening. Meanwhile I'm quite sure the video files are not responsible. I think this may have started after the 2.1 update.
It doesn't really matter if the video files are 3GP or MP4 - these are simply containers and can contain simply or complex video material.
It may be a good idea to backup your data and factory reset the phone. This could stop whatever is crashing the phone. Then monitor the video playback using a good video player like MoboPlayer. The videos should be all simple encoded.
MP4 Videos stop playing / audio only
