Unsupported Video Codec on VLC Andriod

[IBM_THINKPAD_R51]

So I made a 4K video with Adobe Premier Pro and exported it in these settings:

H.264, 4K 59.94 Frame rate, CBR 80mbps

 

I transferred over the 45 second 4K video over to my mothers phone (Samsung Galaxy A10e with andriod 9). And when i try the play the video on that phone it plays the audio, but there is just a black screen and it says unsupported Video codec.

 

I downloaded VLC and VLC also did the same thin, played audio fine, but it says unsupported video codec.

plz halp. 

[Jurrunio]

no way it wont support h264, but more likely it lacks the power for such bitrate and the hardware decoder refuses to work.

[IBM_THINKPAD_R51]

2 minutes ago, Jurrunio said:

no way it wont support h264, but more likely it lacks the power for such bitrate and the hardware decoder refuses to work.

it has an 8 core Arm cpu soo i donno...doesnt make sense

[Origami Cactus]

5 minutes ago, Jurrunio said:

no way it wont support h264, but more likely it lacks the power for such bitrate and the hardware decoder refuses to work.

Yeah, i have noticed that the phone inbuilt hardware decoders are really specific about the supported bitrates at specific resolutions.

 

And no way is a phone gonna software decode that bitrate and res.

ThinkPad man, try something more fit for a phone. You don't have a Sony phone with 4k display, your phone doesn't even have a Full HD display. 1080p 16mbit should be good enough.

 

2 minutes ago, IBM_THINKPAD_R51 said:

it has an 8 core Arm cpu soo i donno...doesnt make sense

Makes perfect sense. That cpu won't software decode anywhere close to that bitrate and res.

[kolchinsky]

What the file format? Here's info on android supported types: https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/media/media-formats

[IBM_THINKPAD_R51]

Just now, Origami Cactus said:

Yeah, i have noticed that the phone inbuilt hardware decoders are really specific about the supported bitrates at specific resolutions.

 

And no way is a phone gonna software decode that bitrate and res.

ThinkPad man, try something more fit for a phone. You don't have a Sony phone with 4k display, your phone doesn't even have a Full HD display. 1080p 10mbit should be good enough.

 

Makes perfect sense. That cpu won't software decode anywhere close to that bitrate and res.

I recoreded the 4K video with a samsung galaxy s9, and even if i just transfer over the bare video from the s9 directly to the a10e it still doesnt like it.

[Origami Cactus]

Just now, IBM_THINKPAD_R51 said:

I recoreded the 4K video with a samsung galaxy s9, and even if i just transfer over the bare video from the s9 directly to the a10e it still doesnt like it.

The a10e is a budget phone with a budget cpu. Look at the samsungs own spec sheet, no 4k anywhere:

https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/exynos/products/mobileprocessor/exynos-7884/

 

But to correct my last point, it turns out that flagship phone cpus can even play those kinds of formats, here is what my sony with a 4k screen could play easily, but it had a top of the class snapdragon, not a cheap exynos:

Spoiler

 

[Kisai]

You're not going to be able to get that video to play. Those settings are not really valid for 4K as 4K needs at least 5.2 main profile to be playable. If you don't export the video constrained to 5.2 main profile, the video is basically unplayable by hardware codecs.

 

https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/media/media-formats

 

It's also possible it just doesn't work.

https://wiki.videolan.org/AndroidFAQ/

 

 

Further research suggests that the CPU/GPU part in the phone tops out at 1080p60 playback. So anything higher than 4.2 main profile will likely not play.

 

[Jurrunio]

36 minutes ago, IBM_THINKPAD_R51 said:

it has an 8 core Arm cpu soo i donno...doesnt make sense

Core count doesnt mean anything and made by ARM doesnt give hope to raw performance. 

[Donut417]

5 hours ago, IBM_THINKPAD_R51 said:

So I made a 4K video with Adobe Premier Pro and exported it in these settings:

H.264, 4K 59.94 Frame rate, CBR 80mbps

 

I transferred over the 45 second 4K video over to my mothers phone (Samsung Galaxy A10e with andriod 9). And when i try the play the video on that phone it plays the audio, but there is just a black screen and it says unsupported Video codec.

 

I downloaded VLC and VLC also did the same thin, played audio fine, but it says unsupported video codec.

plz halp. 

Phones, Tablets, a streaming devices have specific Video, audio and container formats they support. So check your phones specs vs the specs of that video. 

[IBM_THINKPAD_R51]

5 hours ago, Origami Cactus said:

Yeah, i have noticed that the phone inbuilt hardware decoders are really specific about the supported bitrates at specific resolutions.

 

And no way is a phone gonna software decode that bitrate and res.

ThinkPad man, try something more fit for a phone. You don't have a Sony phone with 4k display, your phone doesn't even have a Full HD display. 1080p 16mbit should be good enough.

 

Makes perfect sense. That cpu won't software decode anywhere close to that bitrate and res.

tried 1080p at 80mbit and it worked fine! 80 might be too high for 1080p but it works

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

Tried Mxplayer?

[IBM_THINKPAD_R51]

1 minute ago, Rohith_Kumar_Sp said:

Tried Mxplayer?

yeah didnt like 4k, none of the players did....i guess its really just a chipset limitation.

[Zerotwothefilthyweeabo]

12 hours ago, Origami Cactus said:

Yeah, i have noticed that the phone inbuilt hardware decoders are really specific about the supported bitrates at specific resolutions.

 

And no way is a phone gonna software decode that bitrate and res.

ThinkPad man, try something more fit for a phone. You don't have a Sony phone with 4k display, your phone doesn't even have a Full HD display. 1080p 16mbit should be good enough.

 

Makes perfect sense. That cpu won't software decode anywhere close to that bitrate and res.

Not sure if I am right but for audio I am sure vlc uses its own codecs so I must wonder are they using their own codecs as well . Plus I have a fhd+ display and I am able to view downloaded 4k content (I think it'd h265  though)

[Origami Cactus]

2 minutes ago, Zerotwothefilthyweeabo said:

Not sure if I am right but for audio I am sure vlc uses its own codecs so I must wonder are they using their own codecs as well . Plus I have a fhd+ display and I am able to view downloaded 4k content (I think it'd h265  though)

Yeah, it doesn't depend on the screen, more on the cpu+gpu combo. The one OP had didn't seem to support 4k hardware decoding. 

If you have a FHD+ display, it sounds like an higher end phone, with a better chipset.

[Zerotwothefilthyweeabo]

12 minutes ago, Origami Cactus said:

Yeah, it doesn't depend on the screen, more on the cpu+gpu combo. The one OP had didn't seem to support 4k hardware decoding. 

If you have a FHD+ display, it sounds like an higher end phone, with a better chipset.

Not sure if a msm636 is a high end one (lol)but it did seem to play 4k content fine 

[LAwLz]

13 hours ago, IBM_THINKPAD_R51 said:

I transferred over the 45 second 4K video over to my mothers phone (Samsung Galaxy A10e with andriod 9). And when i try the play the video on that phone it plays the audio, but there is just a black screen and it says unsupported Video codec.

The SoC in the A10e only supports hardware accelerated decoding up to 1080p.

You could try software decoding but there is a risk that your CPU might not be able to handle it. It will also eat your battery right up and make your phone really hot.

 

13 hours ago, IBM_THINKPAD_R51 said:

it has an 8 core Arm cpu soo i donno...doesnt make sense

It's (typically) not the CPU cores decoding video. There is specialized hardware in the chip that only deals with decoding video, and those can be rather picky with what formats, resolutions and framerates they support.

Also, it's worth noting that your CPU is a 2+6 big.LITTLE configuration. It has 8 physical cores, but only 2 of those cores are high performance. The other 6 are small and slow, but energy efficient.

 

 

 

13 hours ago, Kisai said:

You're not going to be able to get that video to play. Those settings are not really valid for 4K as 4K needs at least 5.2 main profile to be playable.

 

https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/media/media-formats

I don't get this comment or why you are linking to the Android supported media formats page.

The settings used are valid (like you said, 5.2). It's just that the particular SoC in OP's phone doesn't support it. Plenty of chips on the market do support it and would play it (in hardware) just fine. It has nothing to do with Android limitations or some invalid profile settings. It's purely a hardware limitation in this particular SoC, like you said later in the post:

13 hours ago, Kisai said:

Further research suggests that the CPU/GPU part in the phone tops out at 1080p60 playback. So anything higher than 4.2 main profile will likely not play.

 

I am worried that making comments like that, where you start bringing up profiles as a reason for why it isn't working and linking to Android's supported formats page will give people the wrong ideas like "Android doesn't support the 4.2 AVC profile", which it does.

[Kisai]

45 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

I don't get this comment or why you are linking to the Android supported media formats page.

The settings used are valid (like you said, 5.2). It's just that the particular SoC in OP's phone doesn't support it. Plenty of chips on the market do support it and would play it (in hardware) just fine. It has nothing to do with Android limitations or some invalid profile settings. It's purely a hardware limitation in this particular SoC, like you said later in the post:

 

I am worried that making comments like that, where you start bringing up profiles as a reason for why it isn't working and linking to Android's supported formats page will give people the wrong ideas like "Android doesn't support the 4.2 AVC profile", which it does.

Because VLC is an App? It's absolutely correct that "some Android devices" don't support 4K video because they don't support 5.2 profile with AVC, because AVC was not intended for 4K video so whatever decoder block in the SoC likely doesn't recognize it if it was only intended to play 1080p video which is 4.2. 

 

Believe me I tried finding actual specs on the chip before posting that (there were no comments on the thread when I started) and the only place it's really mentioned is on the CPU's marketing page, and even then vague. Which is a problem with all Android devices. "Will X device play Y video?" Only if it has a hardware codec to play it or is somehow powerful enough to do it in software with a player that will do it in software and have to rescale it, it's likely the device doesn't have enough memory to do so.

[LAwLz]

10 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Which is a problem with all Android devices. "Will X device play Y video?" Only if it has a hardware codec to play it or is somehow powerful enough to do it in software with a player that will do it in software and have to rescale it, it's likely the device doesn't have enough memory to do so.

Well, that's a problem with ALL devices, if you count it as a problem.

It's not exclusive to Android devices.

[Zodiark1593]

Clearly, you need to encode the video at different settings. The SoC appears to lack support for this codec, and the CPU certainly won’t handle it in software. Try 1080P with AVC Profile 4.2. Keep bit rates at about 40 mbps or lower (Blu Ray spec essentially, which is very compatible). 
 

You may also try 1080P HEVC 8-bit as well as most devices can handle this in hardware too.