Playing video files

[Zebulon Walton]

I mentioned this in a post on the Mobian board but there were no responses. I don't know if this issue is only with that distribution or if it's more general to the Pinephone's video capabilities.

What I've found is that when playing local video files on the Pinephone it cannot keep up with 1080p, or even 480p playback (though the latter is better). To make videos play smoothly I've had to transcode them down to 240p. (Admittedly I have not tried 360, that might work as well, but 240 looks surprisingly good on the phone's small screen.) This is the case whether using Mobian's default video player or the VLC video player.

Is this something that is likely to improve as development continues, or is it just a limitation of the video hardware?

For anyone else running into this issue, I put together a quick-and-dirty shell script that uses ffmpeg to transcode the video to 240p H.264, preserving the aspect ratio, and copies the audio, from the source mp4 and mkv files in the current directory. The resulting reduced resolution files are placed in a "240" subdirectory.

Code:

#!/bin/sh

mkdir 240

for file in *.m??
do
  echo '----------------------------------------'
  echo Processing $file...
  ffmpeg -i "$file" -c:v libx264 -c:a copy -vf scale=-2:240 "240/$file"
  echo '----------------------------------------'
done