[Earvin]

My job requires international travel and I always watch movies on fight, with my 7.0-inch Galaxy Tab. Personally I think the device does a good job playing movies and gives sharp and vivid image. I was surprised by the fact that so many guys are having problems with movie playback when hanging around the forum and decided to share some tips with green hands. Hope this helps people that are having video playback problems.

The 1st tip, better put Galaxy Tab friendly videos to the device. The Galaxy Tab plays various kinds of videos, but this does not mean it can play everything you throw at it. Let’s see Galaxy Tab supported file types:

Video: 3gp, mp4, avi, wmv, flv, mkv (Codec: MPEG4, H.263, Sorenson H.263, H.264, VC-1, DivX/XviD).
Audio: mp3, m4a, mp4, 3gp, 3ga, wma, ogg, oga, aac, flac.
We don’t see vob or mpg format here, which means the stock player does not play them.

The 2nd tip, with a powerful third-party media player you can play more videos, e.g. the above mentioned vob and mpg videos. There are various android optimized universal video players. Recommended media players:
Rock Player FEEWARE）
MoboPlayer（FEEWARE）
QQ Player（FEEWARE）

The 3rd tip, don’t put copy-protected contents onto the Galaxy Tab. Movies purchased from online video stores (e.g. iTunes, Amazon) are restricted to specific computers and devices only. Unfortunately Samsung Galaxy Tab is not granted to play DRM-protected videos. To have the device play these movie purchases, get yourself a DRM removal tool first (e.g. ChewTune).

The 4th tip, compress/convert your HD videos when necessary. By necessary I mean when the Galaxy Tab pops up an error message saying unsupported file or plays video in slow motion.
Before long I owned Galaxy Tab 7.0, I noticed that some 1080p contents tend to run very slow on the device. Lower resolutions run pretty well. When it comes to some 1080p .mkv and avi videos, the playing speed slows down. I tried several other media players and finally realized it has to do with the hardware itself, seems like the device can not handle very high bitrate properly. After down-scale bitrate to 4mpbs the videos plays just fine.

The 5th and last tip, the best settings for converting videos to Galaxy Tab depends. I’ve seen people asking for the “optimal settings” 3 or 4 times elsewhere, and am trying to answer this question. It is said that H.264 codec gives best quality at smallest file size, but I don’t see much difference between H.264 and MPEG-4. I tried to encoded an HD .mkv video to .mp4 with H.264 and MPEG-4 and find both play fine. DivX .avi videos look great too. I think the image quality is more related to video bitrate. When video bit rate is set higher, the converted video looks sharper. Here I put some test videos with settings for evaluation.


Sample 1- mp4 video
0:05:40 MP4 H.264/AAC 1280x720 1000kbps 53M

Sample 2- mp4 video
0:05:40 MP4 H.264/AAC 1280x720 2000kbps 94M

Sample 3- mp4 video
0:05:40 MP4 H.264/AAC 1920x1080 2000kbps 94M

Sample 4- mp4 video
0:05:40 MP4 H.264/AAC 1920x1080 4000kbps 175M

Sample 5- mkv video
0:05:40 MKV H.264/AAC 1280x720 1000kbps 53M

Sample 6- mkv video
0:05:40 MKV H.264/AAC 1920x1080 2000kbps 94M

Sample 7- wmv video
0:05:40 WMV WMV3/WAV 1280x720 1000kbps 51M

Sample 8- avi video
0:05:40 AVI Xvid/MP3 1280x720 1000kbps 48M

(click the links to play or download the sample videos )

These sample videos source a recent release Blu-ray “Thor”, I created them with a trial version of Pavtube Blu-ray Video Converter Ultimate (SHAREWARE), so there’s a watermark on the screen. Personally I think Sample 2 balance file size and video quality best.

[Advertisements]

[eSeM]

I now use Pavtube for all of my video conversion for use on my Tabs.

One thing I have found is that I have some trouble playing some large video files ( > 3GB ) from the micro SD card but if I copy them onto the internal memory they play ok.

[Earvin]

I doubt if it is a kind of limitation- not playing large files from SD card.

[Martino]

Hey there. This was some great info! All the above samples loaded and played great, with the 1080 at 4000kbps MP4 being the best. Thanks for working this out for any future conversions I have to render for the Galaxy 10.1

PLEASE NOTE: If you have the adaptor (Model:EPL-3PHPBEG or as seen here) that allows you to display your Samsung Galaxy 10.1 via your Big Screen TV, you'll want to load Mp4's that are no larger than 720p. Anything higher (using the adapter) will be jerky. Keep your bitrate high (as noted above) and you'll be very happy with the results.

Cheers!

Martino

[johnyauboy]

thanks for the great tips and the test videos. I have now tried to convert my video to one of your test ones and with a bit of luck, this is it. Happy new year and many thanks. John

[chris198810]

Nice post. I've made a conversion with your the video settings you propose. Good quality.