What formats are supported for video?

prog-amateur · 22 Dec 2019, 15:25

@MarkG_108 After careful consideration, I decided to uninstall Ubuntu Touch. The idea I have of a tablet is among other things to play offline videos without worrying about the format, and surf on Firefox (and incidentally some Webextensions), but with UT it's not possible. I even tried to find a solution developing a VLC version as a .click package, but before I even started, @dobey told me it would be very limited. And @AppLee tells me that hardware acceleration is not setup. So I feel like I have a beautiful but useless device.

I'm not saying this to criticize because from what I understand, UT is not meant to be the Debian-derived Ubuntu that everyone knows, and there are a lot of members here so it's good that all these people are happy.

Strictly speaking, based on this experience, I was convinced not to install this OS if I buy a Librem 5 or a Pinephone for the reasons I mentioned before. But I take my hat off to you for managing to keep an OS that was abandoned by Canonical more than 2 years ago. And I hope to be able to monitor the potential evolution of this OS.

AppLee · 22 Dec 2019, 15:34

@prog-amateur On Librem5 or PinePhone, the hardware decoding will be possible.
As of VLC, I read somewhere that it plays well with libertine but it requires a change of skin to interact with the UI.

I hope you'll find something that fits your needs.

MarkG_108 · 22 Dec 2019, 19:30

@prog-amateur I'm actually an end-user rather than a developer of Ubuntu Touch, so no need to deliver any such considerations to me. I was just sharing what worked for me when it came to playing video files on my old Nexus 5. Otherwise, most of the technical stuff I don't get.

dobey · 22 Dec 2019, 21:13

Well, OK @prog-amateur . I don't know why you were unable to play an H.264 video in a Matroska container. It works just fine on my Nexus 4 here with UT.

That said, there are device-specific issues with video playback (such as video playback doesn't work at all on Nexus 5). Perhaps there is a similar issue on Nexus 7?

prog-amateur · 23 Dec 2019, 08:28

@MarkG_108 it's a mistake, my experience sharing reply was for @Giiba (you have the same color image), not to you sorry.

@AppLee : about VLC skin workaround, except if I missed something, this was a proposal that I have made, but if I understood, the same hardware limitations are raised. However, if the Librem 5 / Pinephone can use hardware acceleration, then it is interesting. I hope to follow up the development by UBports team for those projects.

@dobey : it is really strange, both Nexus 4 and Nexus 7 use the same Snapdragon S4 Pro APQ8064 SoC and Adreno 320 GPU. Maybe they can decode small videos and not long (> 20mn), who knows ?

In any case, thank you for having reply and tried to help.

dobey · 23 Dec 2019, 14:05

@prog-amateur said in What formats are supported for video?:

Maybe they can decode small videos and not long (> 20mn), who knows ?

I tried with a full length movie that was 1.5GB, so I doubt that's it.

It seems likely an issue with libhybris or the gstreamer/pulseaudio modules using it.

MarkG_108 · 23 Dec 2019, 15:41

Using my Nexus 5 with UTmedia, I can watch regular full length movies without a problem. However, these are not high resolution blu-ray type movies. They're just regular DVD quality. The high resolution stuff probably wouldn't work (I doubt even my old but reliable Optiplex 755 desktop with 8 gigs of RAM could play high resolution stuff).

doniks · 3 Sept 2020, 09:23

@prog-amateur said in What formats are supported for video?:

is there any available codec plugin that I can install, even from terminal ?

I have a nexus 7 and I had to apt install some gstreamer package ...bad or ...ugly, I guess. Can't check right now

tatonuta · 27 Feb 2020, 14:11

This post is deleted!

tatonuta · 27 Feb 2020, 14:12

@advocatux said in What formats are supported for video?:

@Giiba have you tried to play videos with UTMedia (https://open-store.io/app/utmedia.nfsprodriver)?

There are some issues with the default media player on Nexus 5 but UTMedia works for me.

@advocatux This solution works for me too. (Playing regular videos with H264 - MPEG-4 AVC codec). I run Ubuntu Touch on RC on Nexus 5.