Thanks Tony for the answer and the explanation why the ugly Android logo is shown :-)
But it still puzzles me what the specs of LeMedia running on Guitar are. The marketing text above is more nebulous than clear.
Can 4K or 1080p contents be played smoothly with LeMedia?
And too bad MIPI-CSI isn't available as source for HW accelerated video encoding. Since the Guitar can be fed with 12V I thought about using it as an IP-Cam with power over Ethernet and no need to use a stepdown converter (normally necessary over larger distances when 5V on the wire would drop too much and you have to use higher voltages to compensate)
After reading your posts, I decided to make a small video to answer some of your questions. It's not edited, so there are some parts where the camera shakes a bit and loses focus, but I hope that it will reassure you that it's completely real.
First of all, I'm running Ubuntu 12.04 on the LeMaker guitar. Not Android, as you can see.
The files used to test the playback quality are:
-Sintel.2010.720p (MKV)
-Sintel.2010.1080p (MKV)
-Sintel.2010.4k (MKV)
-The boy with the cuckoo-clock heart (AVI)
-VernalShowB (MP4)
The first 3 are the same movie (the famous Durian movie project, by the Blender institute, in different levels of quality)
As you can see, the first two versions play smoothly and without any issues. The 4K version is playable, but with some slowdown. However, I'm confident that the code might be optimized further to solve this issue.
The following file was a DVD-RIP, and the last one, a video that I captured using my cellphone and edited in Movavi Video suite. Both play without any issues.
By the way, this is the setup I used to make the test:
Something to note: I'm using a generic, low-quality USB drive.
So far, I have tried to push the limits of this little card, and in my personal opinion, I'm amazed.
I have made the Raspberry Pi crash a lot when I tried to execute some software or code that goes beyond its limits...
After reading your posts, I decided to make a small video to answer some of your questions ...
Thx a lot!
Just a suggestion: If you open an xterm and run 'top' inside you might get a clue what's responsible for choppy video output with 4K.
If the thumb drive is the bottleneck then you'll experience high 'I/O wait' values. In top's output it's the 'wa' value in the 3rd line -- would be even better to do a 'apt-get install sysstat' and then just run an 'iostat 5' in xterm since this lists I/O operations for the first available block devices and gives a summary with which tasks the CPU will be busy (and %iowait is an indication that it's waiting for I/O)
Also interesting: If CPU utilisation differs heavily between 720p and 1080p and maxes out while playing 4K then the CPU is the bottleneck (and most likely no HW acceleration happens)
The 4K video now is only can support well under Android, at currently the 4K do not play well under Linux on Guitar.
Almost all 1080P is palyed very well. And I have aksed our Kodi engineer to list all the support formate out after he has tested all the functions.
...at currently the 4K do not play well under Linux on Guitar. Almost all 1080P is palyed very well...
Thx Tony, so this is a confirmation of my assumption "no HW acceleration happens"? The Guitar currently has to decode videos on its CPU cores when running in Linux?
The hardware accleration under Linux works. The GPU can decoding the 1080P or below.The 4K can not be supported by GPU at currently under Linux, the 4K can only support under Android.