So... I just figured out why my higher-end phone (than the Alcatel One Touch 5021e) won't play 720p...

It was the fault of f*cking VLC... Yes gents, VL f*cking C...

I enabled full hardware aceeleration and my vids won't play properly... So I went and said f*ck it and got MXPlayer instead...

Now it plays properly...

The thing with VLC is that it apparently uses software decoding even if you tell it to use hardware decoding... not sure why...

So yeah... don't get VLC for playback and go get MXPlayer instead...

-Hermit