Android phone being picky with video files
December 19, 2014 11:12 PM Subscribe
I'm trying to e-mail a couple of .mp4 videos to my girlfriend's LG G3 Android phone. The first one worked fine, but both of my attempts of the second video are apparently an "unsupported file type." I encoded the videos myself from QuickTime .mov source videos using Avidemux, and I'm at a loss as to why one works but the others don't. (technical info inside)
The first video worked fine, just used Avidemux to downscale the source and encode in x264 with AAC audio. MPC's media info here.
The second video needed to be rotated as well as resized, and I also decided to save a bit of file size by omitting the sound track. I'm pretty sure all the other setting were set up exactly the same, but this video wouldn't play on her phone. Here's the media info. For the second attempt at the second video, I put the sound back in at 56kbps, but no dice. Here's the media info.
The only things that I can think of that between the first file and the other two are that:
-The sound settings are different for all three videos
-The filename of the first video starts with a letter, the other two start with numbers
-I only resized the first source video, while I also had to rotate the second
-I may have somehow changed the settings between encodes
Can anyone shed some light on this? She's in another country and has limited internet access, so I can't just brute-force the problem by sending a bunch of slightly different encodes hoping that one will work.
The first video worked fine, just used Avidemux to downscale the source and encode in x264 with AAC audio. MPC's media info here.
The second video needed to be rotated as well as resized, and I also decided to save a bit of file size by omitting the sound track. I'm pretty sure all the other setting were set up exactly the same, but this video wouldn't play on her phone. Here's the media info. For the second attempt at the second video, I put the sound back in at 56kbps, but no dice. Here's the media info.
The only things that I can think of that between the first file and the other two are that:
-The sound settings are different for all three videos
-The filename of the first video starts with a letter, the other two start with numbers
-I only resized the first source video, while I also had to rotate the second
-I may have somehow changed the settings between encodes
Can anyone shed some light on this? She's in another country and has limited internet access, so I can't just brute-force the problem by sending a bunch of slightly different encodes hoping that one will work.
Other great video players; DicePlayer (supports formats similar to mxplayer, but has some better other scaling options, along with being able to offset audio sync, or change playback rate (1.2 times faster) and background/windowed play) and BSPlayer (quite similar to dice player, except it's much slower to start up (painfully slow), but it manages to correctly play the very few videos that both DicePlayer and MXPlayer have choked on).
posted by nobeagle at 8:09 AM on December 20, 2014
posted by nobeagle at 8:09 AM on December 20, 2014
When you rotated the video of the second one, it means you reencoded the video, and you probably used a different codec. Try using MediaInfo to see what codecs the videos used.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 8:12 AM on December 20, 2014
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 8:12 AM on December 20, 2014
Response by poster: Thanks everyone, MX Player did the job!
posted by clorox at 8:03 AM on December 24, 2014
posted by clorox at 8:03 AM on December 24, 2014
« Older Name that patch of ground I took a picture of! | Amazon won't ship certain items to me in China.How... Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.
I have that phone, and i just went and looked and it has some stupid lg video player app, like their gallery app and a lot of other things. It crashed the first time i opened it! what a hunk of crap! Great phone, decent features baked in... crappy pack in apps mostly.
Mxplayer will probably play every video you've encoded so far. It's also, as far as i can tell, the smoothest/fastest at playing basically anything.
I'm pretty sure the stock video player app just stuttered on a video filmed with the phones own camera and encoded with it as well. It wasn't 4k or anything either, just like 720p/30. Nice job LG.
posted by emptythought at 4:09 AM on December 20, 2014