Playing video files

[marcih]

I installed mpv and tested with 720 and 1080 video files. It plays 1080 fairly well, slightly jerky but not bad. Playback of 720 appears flawless. Looks like that's going to be the default video player. One drawback I see is the controls for pause, etc. are tiny and difficult to operate on the phone. Also if you fire up mpv directly it wants files dragged and dropped to it, there's no menu to directly open up files. I don't see a way to drag and drop with the phone's GUI. Minor nits for better video playback.

Have you taken a look at Celluloid (formerly GNOME mpv)? Basically just an mpv frontend, uses libmpv. If you get a "Failed to create GL context" notice, set the env var "GDK_GL=gles" before launching.

[Zebulon Walton]

@Zebulon Walton, I couldn't even get VLC to work. It installed fine, but the GUI was totally non-responsive. Do you know a workaround for this?

you need to use mpv, vlc is cpu only

Yes, mpv works great aside from the controls being difficult to manipulate since it's not optimized for the phone's touchscreen. I found anything else couldn't reliably play anything over 240p resolution. (Which actually doesn't look bad on the small screen, but mpv playing at 720p does look better.)

[marcih]

Taking back my previous comment about Celluloid, the videos having a blue tint (also described in the wiki article I linked) make it unusable. I was pleasantly surprised by Totem however, the preinstalled "Videos" application, being able to play 720p videos quite well.

[calinb]

I use mplayer. CLI version for videos (keyboard works well for control) and gmplayer GUI version for audio files so I have something on the screen (CLI commands still work, of course, which I usually prefer to the tiny buttons on the GUI player). I don't know what is the highest res I've ever played but I know 720p generally works well. The only OS I've tried that had trouble with mplayer was OpenSUSE. SUSE's default player worked the best for me. Handbrake works well in Mobian too, except scaling makes it hard to use--especially when using non-default settings. Someday I'll try to learn to use the CLI handbrake.