[rushingjs]

I have been playing with a Fire TV for about a week, but I'm not satisfied with the software decoding of MPEG-2. The device is most likely getting returned unless I can figure something out. I've tried Gotham 13.0, 13.1 RC1, and SPMC 12.4.2. They all have provided a similar experience for me in terms of video decoding.

I have tried MPEG-2 with 1080i and 720p with all combinations of libstagefright, MediaCodec, software decoding, and multithreading. The best one is libstagefright only, but I'm still not satisfied with it. It seems that the CPU cannot keep up with high bitrate (>12Mbps) streams and I get dropped frames. Lower bitrate streams are also unacceptable as they appear slightly jerky and they are not de-interlaced (where applicable). 480p MPEG-2 videos look perfect, but I don't care about those. H.264 videos also look perfect, but most of my content is MPEG-2.

I have enabled buffermode=1 and 100MB buffer in my advancedsettings.xml and have confirmed that the dropped frames are not occurring due to network congestion.

I'm comparing the video quality to my Nexus 4 or a PC with hardware acceleration for MPEG-2. On those devices, the MPEG-2 decoding is excellent.

I'm disappointed because Fire TV seems like a perfect device for me with the exception of lack of hardware acceleration for MPEG-2. Now, I'm planning to watch closely what happens with the Android TV announcement at the end of this month.

Anybody else have issues with high bitrate, HD MPEG2 video? Earlier in the thread I saw some users state that HD MPEG2 worked fine with software decoding. I would potentially be using the AFT to play 1080i ATSC video from a mythtv PVR backend, so this is critical for me before I decide to buy this device.