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MKV/AVI video player thoughts

I have tried Rock Player, Meridian, ArcMedia, and MixZing. After all is said and done, arcMediaPro/lite has the best wonky codecs for me. I have several anime's in weird mkv containers, and rock and meridian both play them for 5 seconds then quit or kill my phone. I love that Rock has hardware acceleration, but I wonder if it is on the other two. 2 cents anyone?
 
After trying a bunch of different Media Players for video, I ended up settling on MoboPlayer as my main video file player for my relatively low horsepower LG Optimus. I can't remember why I gave up on Meridian, MixZing, and RockPlayer. (I think it was because they didn't play AVI files or something.)
 
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The only one that played MKV's of all shapes and sizes is arcMediaPlayer pro. Others sometimes stopped at times in the videos and crashed, or would not allow me to seek around correctly in the timeline. I still keep Meridian and Rock Player though.
Like sitlet said, its the codecs that determine how the video is "built".
You could also try other players, since Meridian or MixZing are not universal players.
Rockplayer should be able to handle such videos depending if you are using the version meant for your phone. However, the tests I've carried on HTC Desire, showed that Rockplayer was lagging when others including MoboPlayer performed much better.

The general advice is: use a capable player like MoboPlayer to view your videos. If that fails, simply convert your videos to a less complex one that can be played on your phone (I think there are a lot of topics about that here).
 
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Vplayer force closes on me, same with RockPlayer. Mobo doesn't have the subtittle and audio track selection I need, but I must say it plays what it does play very smoothly. So far, QQPlayer is the best for my needs.
These players respond differently to different phones and the OS they are running. Even the developers have recognized this and made different versions for phones with ARMv6 and ARMv7 instruction sets.

So, it is important to mention which phone you have and what OS version is running on it.
 
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... I love that Rock has hardware acceleration ...

Hardware acceleration means, that RockPlayer uses the decoder of the stock player (which has hardware acceleration) for playing.
Only with set to its own software decoder RockPlayer can show its fine features :)

EDIT: ArcMedia player has the same setting option:
"Optimised Decoder" (checkbox):
"Play media files with the optimised decoder (uncheck for core decoder)"

Harry
 
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