[casualbeta]

Hi there guys,

I have a issue in regarding to Playlist Loader addon that has been loaded with Movies and Live Streaming Channels.

When ever I try to play on one of the movies or channels on an android box it would have audio playing but no videos. The only thing I would see is a grey background screen and that would be it. However when I play the same add on (and loaded with the same content) it would be okay and be able to play both video and audio. So as you can see this has become hit or miss kind of issue I am facing.

Does anyone know what is going on? Could be that the machines are too slow or old maybe?

Any help would be great.
And if you need to know more feel free to ask me any questions and I will try to answer them the best as possible.


Thanks

[FredInLively]

From your description, this seems to me to be a codec issue. If you are using hardware decoding, and have either the wrong codec (only 1) selected, or the wrong codec as well as other valid hardware decoders (more than 1) selected, you can lose the video rendering during the decoding process. I found that this commonly manifests as a completely blank (and black) video display with the on-screen overlay still visible. On most of my Android media player hardware boxes, you can see (System/Setting/Video/Acceleration) an option for hardware/software decoding method (select hardware). Directly below is another set of 3 options for the type of hardware decoding allowed. I have found (for most of my 4 different hardware boxes) turning the "amcodec" off, and the "libstagefright" and "MediaCodec" on, fixed the issue for me. The default settings for all of the boxes turn all 3 hardware codecs on ... and that's not what I needed to make all the hardware decoding work.

By the way it seems that for most hardware boxes that are at least duo-core, software decoding is able to render input frame rates up to 720p. If you notice your video becoming "chunky", and you have a sufficiently robust data rate all the way to your box (that means NO WIFI LINKS anywhere), you'll know that your boxes CPUs and chipset can't keep up any more, and you're forced to use hardware codecs for decompression.

Hope this helps!