No HW decoding of VC-1 Advanced profile via MediaCodec

[CiNcH83]

The MediaTek MT5891 SoC is perfectly capable of decoding VC-1 Advanced as the stock Video app shows no problem playing it back. This app however seems to have access to some private API definitions (via libstagefright).

Decoding VC-1 Advanced via the standard Android MediaCodec API is currently not properly supported and is therefore software decoded in Kodi via ffmpeg. The weak ARM cores of the MediaTek SoC obviously can’t handle the decoding of 1080p in real-time.

MediaTek drivers on Sony lack the respective codec:

OMX.MTK.VIDEO.DECODER.VC1                                video/wvc1

MediaTek drivers however expose:

OMX.MTK.VIDEO.DECODER.WMV                                video/x-ms-wmv

Some players instantiate the latter decoder in the hope that it can handle VC-1 Advanced profile. In VLC, this MTK decoder is blacklisted though as it only produces a black image for such content.

There is certainly a lack of information on how to properly handle VC-1 on MediaTek platforms.

(Here is a list of over 700 Blu-ray titles (>15%) encoded in VC-1.)

[sjpotter]

it seems mx player knows how to play hardware accelerated vc-1. tested last night and it shows its regular hw icon. when one switches it to sw decoding, it becomes a frame dropping mess, like vlc is.

[CiNcH83]

Yes. Like the stock Video app, also MX Player can make use of libstagefright for decoding VC-1.

[CiNcH83]

@MESWEB I am trying to keep this place as clean as possible so that it can act as a reference. Your postings are adding more noise, not really belonging to this issue but seemly being a mixture of other issues also mentioned in this tracker:

• WLAN throughput often dropping to 1/4th of the available bandwidth
• Video app plays VC-1 within MKV with severe stuttering