Subsonic video on Android

[Bierak]

Problem Description:
(Long time Subsonic user, first time forum poster. Be Gentle)
When I play video on my Google TV or web browser on the PC, Subsonic looks beautiful. But When I use my Droid or my brothers Evo it runs great for the first 3-7 minutes then it's choppy/slow.

I recently bought a Motorola Xoom with Flash 10.2 and it had the same problem (Choppy/Slow after a few minutes). I know the Tegra 2 processor (In the Xoom, Atrix, and Droid Bionic) has problems
playing high profile H.264 but my movies are being transcoded to FLV through Subsonic.

Does anyone else have problems playing video over their original Droid or Xoom? Also any future updates for an option to use flash or VLC player?

_____________________________________________________________
Playback Application and version: Android App, Version 2.7

Subsonic Version: 4.4 (build 2172) – February 6, 2011

Server Version: jetty-6.1.x, java 1.6.0_24, Windows 7 (42.0 MB / 63.4 MB

Hardware Platform: Windows

Java Memory Limit: 1024

Problem Filename: N/A

Output from ffmpeg -i: Not sure how to do this, assistance is needed.

Last ten log file lines: [4/3/11 9:57:27 AM CDT] INFO PlaylistInputStream ******** listening to "Season 01\Episode 02 - Rising Malevolence.avi"

[4/3/11 9:57:27 AM CDT] DEBUG TranscodeInputStream Starting transcoder: [c:\subsonic\transcode\ffmpeg] [-ss] [3] [-i] [D:\TV Shows\The Clone Wars\Season 01\Episode 02 - Rising Malevolence.avi] [-async] [1] [-b] [300k] [-s] [426x240] [-ar] [44100] [-ac] [2] [-v] [0] [-f] [flv] [-]

[djembeman]

My Droid 1 doesn't play video at all. The JW Player loads and it just sits there at the loading circle for ever. I CAN play video from Subsonic in my MacBook browser without any problems.

One thing I would like though is to be able to fast-forward. Is that where the Air-Player would come in handy?

So, I have the Android app connecting just fine to my Subsonic server to play music. I just can't play videos. I have tried starting videos from the App and from directly connecting to my server in Dolphin Browser and default Browser. I get the same thing in both instances. Of course all the app does is gives me the choice to open the video using one of the two browsers named above.

Is Subsonic supposed to work for playing movies on Android??? All that I've read says that it's for streaming music.

[djembeman]

Is Subsonic supposed to work for playing movies on Android??? All that I've read says that it's for streaming music.

Well, the description in the Android Market says that it's supposed to play video.

Still looking for someone with a Droid 1 that can watch videos streaming from Subsonic... "Stream music and video" "Most video formats are supported too"[/quote]

[lkroeker]

I haven't run into any major issues with streaming video to my phone.

I've got an Xperia X10 running Android 2.2.1 Flash 10.2.156.12 Subsonic App 2.7

I mostly use the streaming feature when I'm in my house, but it works away from home as well.

What type of system is your server running on?
Could be a resource issue, if your processor isn't fast enough it could be having trouble decoding on the fly.

[Afrosquad]

Problem Description:
(Long time Subsonic user, first time forum poster. Be Gentle)
When I play video on my Google TV or web browser on the PC, Subsonic looks beautiful. But When I use my Droid or my brothers Evo it runs great for the first 3-7 minutes then it's choppy/slow.

I recently bought a Motorola Xoom with Flash 10.2 and it had the same problem (Choppy/Slow after a few minutes). I know the Tegra 2 processor (In the Xoom, Atrix, and Droid Bionic) has problems
playing high profile H.264 but my movies are being transcoded to FLV through Subsonic.

Does anyone else have problems playing video over their original Droid or Xoom? Also any future updates for an option to use flash or VLC player?

_____________________________________________________________
Playback Application and version: Android App, Version 2.7

Subsonic Version: 4.4 (build 2172) – February 6, 2011

Server Version: jetty-6.1.x, java 1.6.0_24, Windows 7 (42.0 MB / 63.4 MB

Hardware Platform: Windows

Java Memory Limit: 1024

Problem Filename: N/A

Output from ffmpeg -i: Not sure how to do this, assistance is needed.

Last ten log file lines: [4/3/11 9:57:27 AM CDT] INFO PlaylistInputStream ******** listening to "Season 01\Episode 02 - Rising Malevolence.avi"

[4/3/11 9:57:27 AM CDT] DEBUG TranscodeInputStream Starting transcoder: [c:\subsonic\transcode\ffmpeg] [-ss] [3] [-i] [D:\TV Shows\The Clone Wars\Season 01\Episode 02 - Rising Malevolence.avi] [-async] [1] [-b] [300k] [-s] [426x240] [-ar] [44100] [-ac] [2] [-v] [0] [-f] [flv] [-]

I have these exact same issues (over wifi) with a near identical setup (Xeon (i7 based) quad core server). The server load is negligible. I've tried with 3 different android devices (Galaxy Tab, Epic 4g and Evo 4g) and all have the same video slowdown issue that happens about ~10-15 minutes in. This is running Android 2.2 and 2.3. I've also installed Subsonic on several other PC's and the same issue happens. I've updated ffmpeg and jplayer to little effect.

I've worked on this problem for weeks but cannot get over this hump. It is extremely frustrating because it works perfectly in a PC web browser. Any help or pointers would be great.

[drixtol]

Im in the same boat, stellar i7 server feeding video to android and around the 10-12 minute mark it starts stuttering and lagging.

[GJ51]

I get the best results by preformatting the video to flv and bypassing all transcoding for play on mobil devices. Demos available in the video folder on my server below.

[drixtol]

ive got ~12 terabytes of video. id rather not have to format it for mobile when i just wanna watch something on the fly. It doesnt make sense that the transcoding would be the problem. Normally that would imply there would be a stutter problem from the beginning?

[GJ51]

I understand that SS may not yet be able to fit your needs, but the original intent of the dev when it was rolled out was to provide an experience similar to Youtube. There are several factors that affect video playback, transcoding being a big part of the process if used. Unfortunately, in it's default configuration ffmpeg only uses one core on multi-core CPU's when transcoding. I have read posts claiming that there is a setting that can be used to enable more cores for transcoding, but I've never tested it as I get what I need by bypassing the transcoding altogether.

The other factors of course, are upload speed from the server and the connection at the other end where the video is being received. I've also done some tests where the graphics power of the playback device can also affect playback performance.

Although it is certainly impractical to reformat 12TB of video just to play on a mobile device, it isn't too unrealistic to reformat a few that you'd like to watch while on the road. I get fair results with transcoding on on my Xeon quad core server, but it absolutely rocks with the transcoding off. I can stream multiple HD videos internaly and have successfully watched Blue ray video over the internet when I get good download speeds at the receiving end.

I've temporarily enabled the Movies folder on my public server for testing if you'd like to see how it works with your devices. There's also a demo in the videos folder of multiple straems from the server with SS while also streaming an HD video from the same server through WMC.

[drixtol]

aye, bandwidth aside, on any other client than mobile ive had no issues no matter the quality.

im not really to worried as mobile video isnt that important to me, i just figured id mention i was havin the problem incase anyone wanted to data mine the problem

[GJ51]

Video playback is one area that takes a bit of experimenting to get a feel for what's real;istic and what's not. While I was playing aroung a bit I tested one of the Blue ray quality videos on my test site at my desktop. Playback was flawless. After about a minute the video was fully loaded and I could use the seek bar to skip around. I then tested the same video on my netbook. The results were less than ideal as you could tell it was struggling to play the high res video on the 1024X600 screen. Not the ideal device for playing a 1920X1080 video. The same video plays fine on my daughters Dell XPS 15" laptop that has a 1920X1080 screen witha descent Nvidia controller. I then loaded a standard DVD quality mp4 onto the netbook and it ran perfectly as the video quality wasn't as much of a leap in screen res.

Some users want Subsonic to play their Blue Ray library to their Android device while hosting SS on an Atom powered 512MB host PC. It ain't gonna happen. But if you know your hardware, you can configure SS to get great results.

[keckskoenig]

Another question I had earlier this day.

Is it possible toconfigure subsonic / Subsonic Transoders to NOT transcode to flv ?
I want to stream the file (xvid avis) as they are. possibly with lower bitrate.
Couldn't work out how?

my android device is capable of playing avis so why use flv player instead of direkt avi streaming?

any tips on how to configure it ?!

thx so far!

[GJ51]

That can be a bit trickier. If you've already got SS sending video to other than the default SS player, then just uncheck the transcoding for whatever player you're using.

Go to Settings/Players and uncheck the transcoding at the bottom. Be sure to hit the Save button then give it a try.