Putting video on "internal storage" REALLY HELPS PLAYBACK!!

[DSperber]

I guess this shouldn't surprise me, but I wanted to share this discovery.

I had filled most of my 32GB J3's internal storage with MP3 music. Then I put the rest of my music on the 32GB SanDisk external storage card. And finally I put a fair number of xVid AVI videos on the remaining space on the external card.

Well playback of the videos was extremely choppy... very surprising. Furthermore I seemed to have a bad lip-sync audio/video problem.

Initially, I thought the lip-sync issue might have been because of some additional audio processing the J3 was doing... as the default settings for "Pitch correction" and "Subtitle" were both ON. I don't need either of them, so I set them both to OFF.

However that didn't fix my lip-sync problem. And of course my video playback was also still choppy and jerky.


Tonight I decided to investigate further, and placed one of those AVI videos on the internal storage \Video folder while deleting it from the external storage \Video folder location.

Then I re-booted, and played that AVI (now from internal storage).

Well... not only do I no longer have a lip-sync audio/video problem, but my AVI plays smoothly and continuously. No more choppiness and jerkiness.


I will now clean out lots of music from its current internal location, instead relocating it onto the external storage card... swapping it with the AVI video files which will now live entirely on the internal storage location.

External storage Class 2 speeds don't seem to have any impact on MP3 audio playback. But it sure does seem to impact high-res high-bitrate video. The internal storage (seemingly Class 6 maybe?) speed makes all the difference in the world for video.


I'm just sayin'...

[wrathchild]

I put all my videos on my sandisk 16gb class 2 microsd card and have never had any issues at all. No choppiness or audio sync issues. I put some videos on the J3 internal memory and saw no difference. I do get some lag with any pictures I put on the card, but other than that I'm good.

[DSperber]

Could be differences in video characteristics that make the difference.

Mine are almost all xVid AVI (high-quality high bitrate encoding), 640x480, PCM stereo audio (not MP3), etc., created from MPG captures on my computer from S-video analog input (using ATI TV Wonder 650 PCI card).

Here's a sample, from a 750MB file.

[wrathchild]

Originally Posted by DSperber

Could be differences in video characteristics that make the difference.

Mine are almost all xVid AVI (high-quality high bitrate encoding), 640x480, PCM stereo audio (not MP3), etc., created from MPG captures on my computer from S-video analog input (using ATI TV Wonder 650 PCI card).

Here's a sample, from a 750MB file.

I'm playing mostly movies and tv shows I've downloaded. Here is a sample of one of the movies:



That's the movie Red Planet and it looks awesome. Most of my tv shows are stuff like south park and Robot Chicken and they're basically all:



And they are all xvid .avi

[DSperber]

Well, now it's clear. My AVI videos are 20-40 times the video bitrate of yours. And 4-8 times the audio bitrate. Plus my video frame size is much taller as well, requiring much more CPU horsepower to resize onto the J3's screen.

Now maybe I could have significantly cut the bitrates (both audio and video) with zero audible or visual degradation on the J3, but that's simply not how I created them when I created them.

I think my video files simply require more processing power to present, and the high bitrate requires faster memory-to-CPU delivery.

Hence my observations when videos were stored on Class 2 external 32GB SanDisk card, vs. being stored on [Class 6?] J3 internal storage.

[dfkt]

Originally Posted by DSperber

Could be differences in video characteristics that make the difference.

Mine are almost all xVid AVI (high-quality high bitrate encoding), 640x480, PCM stereo audio (not MP3), etc., created from MPG captures on my computer from S-video analog input (using ATI TV Wonder 650 PCI card).

Here's a sample, from a 750MB file.

Those bitrates are completely insane! The audio track is uncompressed WAV at 48kHz/16bit DVD quality, much bigger than any original audio track, no matter if DVD MP2, stereo Blu-Ray AC3/DTS, or anything else out there. The 7000kbps bitrate for video is something that would be enough for a decent quality 1080p h.264 rip (~7 times the image size than 640x480) - for a standard 480i/p two-pass XviD ASP@L5 anything above 1000kbps is overkill and won't result in better video quality.

I am actually amazed the J3 can handle files with that huge bandwidth at all. That means, theoretically the J3's processor is perfectly capable of playing back 720p and maybe even 1080p HD - but unfortunately no 720p I tested worked.

[gunslingerfry]

And I thought I was insane for having 1500kb/s video on the J3! There's no reason to have those files so large. They're just wasting valuable space on your J3/storage card.

I'm also impressed the J3 can handle it. My Touch Pro 2 chugs after 750kb/s. Bravo Cowon. Then again, maybe it just downsamples it.

[DSperber]

Originally Posted by gunslingerfry

And I thought I was insane for having 1500kb/s video on the J3! There's no reason to have those files so large. They're just wasting valuable space on your J3/storage card.

True.

Actually these AVI files were made years ago targeted for my PC (not the J3), converted from captured 640x480 MPG's (via S-video analog, from my TV capture card) and I really didn't have an idea what would make sense for the many parameters I had available to play with through VirtualDub and xVid.

I'm sure I experimented with a variety of video bitrates, looking for some acceptable value, but probably "erred" way on the "insane" side because it was "quality" I was concerned with, not file size. I certainly wanted to retain the original 640x480 dimensions, again because this was going to be played either on my PC or used to produce a DVD.

As far as audio is concerned, well I never really thought to compress what had been raw-captured by the TV capture card. Again, that high audio bitrate wasn't a problem for playback on the PC or on a DVD.

I agree, since I still have the original MPG captures, it probably seems very reasonable to spend some time and re-do these with the J3 in mind. Obviously I could get away with much lower bitrates and MUCH smaller file sizes.

On the other hand... the J3 DOES seem to be able to cope with these, as-is. Also, playing these 640x480 versions out to TV (using the USB TV-out video cable I purchased) presents them just like they were the originals. Same audio and video quality, so that pleases me.

Honestly, file size on my 64GB J3 is not a big concern for me for the handful of videos I've put on it. That's why I bought the 32GB+32GB model. Much more important is audio and video quality.