[Q] What video codecs for hardware acceleration?

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I have a bunch of 1080p MKV movies that I want to convert into mobile versions for the Galaxy S II, but does anyone know what codecs I should use in order to take advantage of better battery life?

I play to shrink these down to 800x480 res. Any recommendations on bitrate too?

Also, any software or guides recommended to convert MKV to whatever codec has hardware acceleration for this phone?

All the video formats that the phone can play natively are hardware accelerated. So u can choose from MP4, avi, FLV and so on.....

I don't have much knowledge regarding the subject. But here's what I gathered:

According to Wikipedia:

The Exynos 4210, unlike Tegra 2, features support for ARM's SIMD engine (Media Processing Engine, a.k.a NEON instructions) and this may have a significant performance advantage in some cases over Tegra 2 in critical performance situations such as accelerated decoding for multiple multimedia codecs and formats (e.g., On2's VP6/7/8 or Real formats).

Now, to take advantage of that hardware there also needs to be software that supports it.

MoboPlayer is one such software, that I know of, which has "ARM V7_NEON" playback codec and so it will fully utilize Galaxy S2 resources.

As to regards to which format you should convert...

On the MoboPlayer website is said that: "Almost all video formats(need to choose "software decoding" mode inmost cases)."

So I suppose what you need to do, is to disable "software decoding" mode and see what video formats will be supported in hardware mode.

Originally Posted by stra

I don't have much knowledge regarding the subject. But here's what I gathered:

According to Wikipedia:



Now, to take advantage of that hardware there also needs to be software that supports it.

MoboPlayer is one such software, that I know of, which has "ARM V7_NEON" playback codec and so it will fully utilize Galaxy S2 resources.

As to regards to which format you should convert...

On the MoboPlayer website is said that: "Almost all video formats(need to choose "software decoding" mode inmost cases)."

So I suppose what you need to do, is to disable "software decoding" mode and see what video formats will be supported in hardware mode.

I live in the US and we don't have the SGS2 released here yet. Can anyone who has the phone already, please test this out and let us know which codecs are hardware accelerated with MoboPlayer?

I found this guide for transcoding:

http://forum.videohelp.com/threads/2...using-mencoder

I don't think there is an "optimum" bitrate because that is going to vary depending on content, ie, number of fast motion scenes. Maybe encode it in VBR and set the top limit fairly high.

I know this phone will handle 1080p MKV, but some of my mkv files are like 12gb!

Hi, dont bother with anything else, handbrake should be your tool of choice. There are various templates included but I usually just set it to MP4 high profile and choose the file size I want, handbrake then does the rest and bloody well too.

Do a search on here for handbrake, there may already be threads about it, note though you should only really have to re-encode if you movies are over 4 gig (fat 32 limit) as I haven't found a file this phone wont play yet with one player or another. My players of choice are always stock first, then mobo, then DICE.

Originally Posted by stoolzo

Hi, dont bother with anything else, handbrake should be your tool of choice. There are various templates included but I usually just set it to MP4 high profile and choose the file size I want, handbrake then does the rest and bloody well too.

Do a search on here for handbrake, there may already be threads about it, note though you should only really have to re-encode if you movies are over 4 gig (fat 32 limit) as I haven't found a file this phone wont play yet with one player or another. My players of choice are always stock first, then mobo, then DICE.

Thanks mate! Actually, I'm getting this phone for my GF for our anniversary and she's a big Harry Potter geek, she has all the books and blu-ray. I've already converted her blu-rays to MKV so she can have them all on the XPS 15, but I was hoping to convert the MKV down to a mobile friendly format.

All the HP movies add up to 80gb so I can't just copy the MKV's on there, that's why I was thinking of transcoding again.

I did find this bit of info on the Exynos:

http://www.samsung.com/us/business/o...Exynos_v11.pdf

1080p Video Encode/Decode
- H.264 30fps
- MPEG-4 30fps
- VC-1 30fps

It doesn't say what container it supports but from what you say, it sounds like MP4 is the way to go. Thanks for the Handbrake tip!

one thing you should aware of is that if you intend to get the MHL>HDMI adapter at some point you may want to transcode at a resolution a little higher as it wont look great on the TV. If you are just playing on the phone then you can get them down to a fraction of the size. I found the best thing to do was to find a smaller film clip that was encoded as 1080 MKV and run off some tests, then save off the template and batch convert the log. I converted all my start trek films from 8 gig to 2 gig a piece, I left them at 1080p but set the file size down to 2 gig. The all look great on my Phone and still really good on my TV through the HDMI, best of both worlds.

Originally Posted by stoolzo

one thing you should aware of is that if you intend to get the MHL>HDMI adapter at some point you may want to transcode at a resolution a little higher as it wont look great on the TV. If you are just playing on the phone then you can get them down to a fraction of the size. I found the best thing to do was to find a smaller film clip that was encoded as 1080 MKV and run off some tests, then save off the template and batch convert the log. I converted all my start trek films from 8 gig to 2 gig a piece, I left them at 1080p but set the file size down to 2 gig. The all look great on my Phone and still really good on my TV through the HDMI, best of both worlds.

Wow, that's crazy! I doubt my gf will ever output these to a TV. I'm still playing with Handbrake's settings.

One thing I don't get about it is that HP is 1920x800'ish, so when I set it to 800, the height drops down to 336'ish.

I think I'd rather have it fullscreen and sacrifice cropping some of the sides, so I clicked ASPECT RATIO and set the height to 480.

Handbrake set the width to 1152, so I set a crop of 176 on left and right, to try to bring the final size back down to 800x480.

But Handbrake has some weird algorithm that doesn't seem to give the desired result? It changed the output size of the video on its own after I changed the cropping values.

So, I'm not quite sure how cropping is handling in Handbrake, is it done before or after the resolution is resized?

Mobo can't use HW video decoder. SW decoder use SIMD(NEON) instructions.

Exynos HW video decoder can decode 1080p.

Try diceplayer. it use HW video decoder in Exynos ( Multi Function Codec )

Originally Posted by juami

Mobo can't use HW video decoder. SW decoder use SIMD(NEON) instructions.

Exynos HW video decoder can decode 1080p.

Try diceplayer. it use HW video decoder in Exynos ( Multi Function Codec )

Thanks but does it also depend on which container or codec the video is in?

I'm assuming that h.264 video in a MP4 container should be hardware accelerated right?