Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Toshiba AC100 trials

Got a Toshiba AC100 for just Rs. 10,000, wanted to try and play the Planetarium shows from it since it had an HDMI out and is supposed to be HD capable. It played the 6 Mbps Xvid videos without hiccups, but the HDMI out was not stable. Pausing the video would cause the HDMI to be interrupted, so that the projector would show a black screen. Also, there seemed to be no way to play a playlist of multiple videos one after the other.

Moboplayer was supposed to be one of the players for Android which supports playlists. Since the Toshiba AC100 does not have the Android Market, downloaded and installed it from apktops.com. But it appears that the playlist support needs the menu, which needs to be accessed by a swipe on the touchscreen, and the AC 100 does not have a touchscreen! Foiled!

Tried installing Linux on the device instead of Android. But the players in Linux were disappointing. The default movie player in Ubuntu and vlc both were quite unable to play the 1080p 6 Mbps movie files - played like a slide show, only updating the frame when seeking etc. mplayer was better, but was still dropping frames. So, restored Android.

Tried an android port of mplayer. Unfortunately it skips frames when playing the 6 Mbps 1080p XVid movie files.

Then tried mvideoplayer, downloading from some download site - I think mediafire. It works reasonably well, playing all the files in one folder sequentially like a playlist. It is supposed to support playlists, but I have not been able to make playlists with it yet, it says "No playlists found" even when m3u pls and asx files are in the usb disk.

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