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Help Hdmi output

RedAnt

Well-Known Member
Nov 6, 2011
129
30
NH
I bought this MHL cable.

http://item.mobileweb.ebay.com/viewitem?itemId=110832609226

When plugged into just hdmi and my 3VO, the phone gets slow and the screen reacts poorly. If I then power the other female USB port on the cable I see a notice saying "video out connected (hdmi)". This shows up as a constant notice with a subtitle that reads "Play a video or slideshow to display on exter..." (fades off screen).

So at this point I just assume it needs power and it should be working. But I have never seen video coming out.

I thought perhaps it only worked with some players, so I tried the stock ICS Playmovies and Gallary, without any video displayed on HDMI. Once I did here audio from an old video streem I took on my Triumph.

On the Playmovies app there is an output button on the top right corner of the screen but I have never seen any choice besides the phone.

Anyone have insight on this.
 
I haven't tried mine yet, but you need to connect the mhl adapter to your phone, and then a separate power usb cable to the mhl adapter for power, like your charging cable. Both need to be connected or it won't work.


That appears to be what occurred with my cable. It behaved oddly when not powered, and sent a notification that it should work, after I powered it.

My issue is that the best I achieved was audio, never video. Not sure if I am missing a step, or what I should be expecting to see.

Does our phone always mirror the screen?

Will it only work with apps that have some special hook for sending output?

Perhaps the HDMI isn't working on our VM rom. Maybe it all works fine, I just got an incorrect or broken cable.
 
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I have gotten further with the cable. It seems to be very picky with the order things are connected.

I have still not seen video on my 22 inch Toshiba. But on my 52 inch Samsung I was able to get short periods of video. There may be a trick where you need to reboot before the HDMI status shows up.

When it all works correctly you get an HDMI notification and working video mirrored to your display.

Most often you get nothing, but a charging phone.

If you get the HDMI notification and no video, it might be that the tv isn't compatible?

The usb power can come from a wall power source. But I also had it work with power from the tv.

I have not been able to figure out a pattern that always works. I have not tried to control the phone with the tv remote.
 
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I have gotten further with the cable. It seems to be very picky with the order things are connected.

I have still not seen video on my 22 inch Toshiba. But on my 52 inch Samsung I was able to get short periods of video. There may be a trick where you need to reboot before the HDMI status shows up.

When it all works correctly you get an HDMI notification and working video mirrored to your display.

Most often you get nothing, but a charging phone.

If you get the HDMI notification and no video, it might be that the tv isn't compatible?

The usb power can come from a wall power source. But I also had it work with power from the tv.

I have not been able to figure out a pattern that always works. I have not tried to control the phone with the tv remote.


very important, did the mirrored video come as 720, 1080 or 480?

on the triumph, it outputted 480p upscaled to 720p pixel. it was still blurry and bad though. not TRUE pixel perfect 720.

how does the evo v look? its a huge buying decision for me. the difference between 480 and 720 should be very noticable
 
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I believe that I have a bad cable, so this may not be a good test. The video looked like 480 to me, worse than the Triumph. I asked my seller about what I have seen and they offered a refund for my bad cable.

The MT real HDMI port seems to work a lot better than the 3VO has with my cable.

There may be a reason most of these MHL cables are the small box with a female HDMI port. I am not convinced that the single cable works correctly.

I will be contacting a seller with options and ask them for the best one they offer. I really hope that all MHL converters are not as tempermental as this convenient single cable solution has seemed to be.
 
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Well I did get a replacement MHL cable, one of the common little boxes with a female HDMI port.

Now it seems to work fine. Here is a summary of my experience.

First off it looks pretty good but not great. It sends a 1080 signal at 30 frames per second. Since it mirrors the screen I suspect that it is sending out an exact pixel match image that is upscaled. It does not look like it is a 720p, but might be better than 480, so what I see matches expectations of an upscaled screen.

It only synchronized with two of my three TVs. The one that doesn't work shows the notification bar HDMI icon, but displayed a black screen. The TV is an early 22 inch tv/monitor that is not capable of displaying a 1080 signal. It utilizes a computer monitor resolution lcd panel, so it never really displays at its native lcd resolution. My guess is that the MHL only outputs 1080, and may not be tolerant of anything odd.

First connection is not always easy. Here's what I've experienced.

If you connect and it just works you will see a small HDMI icon in the notification bar, followed by output on the big screen. The phone continues to display everything so navigation is normal. I find the phone gets hot behind the camera. As long as the phone screen is powered an sending output the HDMI mirrors it. There seems to be minor dropouts, but it might just be streaming video. My xfinity player app is nice, after each show it turns off the phone. If the tv has auto off it should all turn off nicely if you fall asleep.

Sometimes you see nothing and the phone gets slow, the interface & clicks don't respond well. You might just be able to turn off (and back on) the phone's screen. At times a phone screen power cycle, our MHL cable replugging will yield success. More likely, when phone behavior is erratic, you need to fully reboot the phone with everything still connected. Rebooting does seem to do something, like loading a kernel driver for MHL.

While streaming a show with the xfinity app the phone battery gets slowly drained. If you have any juice in the battery, I don't see this as a problem, as the drain rate appears to be about the same as normal phone powered on use. You would need to watch a few movies to drain the battery.

The heat build up and battery drain make me think there's a lot of cpu used. I have not looked at that yet.

From my experience I would not recommend the MHL cables that do not require a separate HDMI cable. I may have just received a bad cable, but I think they could just be less stable.
 
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I am using this adapter;

Amazon.com: Menotek Micro USB to HDMI MHL Adapter IMPROVED WITH RCP (Remote Control Protocol) for Samsung Galaxy S2, HTC Evo 3D, HTC Evo 4G Tablet, HTC Sensation 4G, Sprint Epic 4G Touch, Galaxy Nexus: Electronics

along with a standard HDMI cable from Monoprice and the charger/usb cable that came with the HTC phone (to provide power through the adapter).

My experiences;

1) I first tried this with a cheap HDMI cable purchased somewhere on Amazon, the television did not even recognize that the unit was plugged into it. I grabbed one of my Monoprice HDMI cables, and it immediately started working. This is on a 6 year old Sharp 1080p LCD TV. This solution works every single time I plug it into this television, without fail, or other strange activity.

2) As soon as the TV recognizes the unit is plugged in, the phone indicates that there is HDMI output in the notification bar and the television indicates that it is receiving a 720p signal as the home screen image shows up on the television (the Sense homescreen is vertical on the TV as it always is on the phone, with black areas to the left and right).

3) I first tested with a 720p mp4 file with AAC audio using the phone's native viewer. This file plays flawlessly on the phone alone. The file started to play and there was stuttering on the screen when there was motion in the video, I hit the back button on the phone once to hide the viewer's overlay and the video smoothed out fairly well.

4) I then tested a 1080p mp4 file with AAC audio, again using the phone's native viewer, keeping in mind this file plays perfectly on the phone alone. The file started to play, massive stuttering, and even after hiding the viewer's overlay controls, the stuttering continued. The phone was really struggling at this point and was starting to heat up quite a bit.

Conclusion;

In any tests that I run, the quality of the video on the television is okay, but definitely not the full quality of the original video file, so as Redant mentioned, the phone is definitely scaling the image for the TV. This is unfortunate. Because the phone struggled so badly to provide the TV with a smooth image with the 1080p video file, I find myself wishing there was an option to simply render the video ONLY on the TV (leaving only the controls visible on the phone). I believe an app could do this and it would be far less CPU work for the phone if it didn't have to show the video file on it's own screen forcing CPU work to scale to the TV on the side.
 
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I would love to see an HDMI output solution that mirrored when the screen gets touched (so you can touch control it) but could turn off the phone screen when not needed.

Even better would be to just stream video out the HDMI natively with controls on the phone when needed (ideally dark when not touched)
 
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