Render to iPad and Android tablets

[Mike Smith]

What data rate do you think your customers / those you want to support can reasonably expect to achieve, on e.g. 3G connections …. ? Your 6.5 Mb/s seems highly optimistic. “an effective throughput of 1 to 4 Mbps on many networks on an iPad” is from https://www.macworld.com/article/1151168/250mb_ipad_plan_management.html

[Andrew Donaldson]

Hey Mike, thanks for your reply.

Most of our video content is downloaded with the app. So the network speed wouldn’t have an effect on the playback speed.

funnily enough the videos in the magazine that do stream, playback just fine!

Thanks for the link, I’ll go have a read now…

[Juan Manuel]

Are you sure the processors in the original Ipad and lower end Android tablets can deal with such a rather high bitrate? With those dimensions, you could use half the bitrate and still get a good enough result. And it will also reduce the data consumption for customers with a cap. BTW, why those dimensions? It’s not quite 4:3, which is the Ipad’s aspect ratio and would display stretched (thus also straining lower end processors) or with black bars in Android tablets.

[Andrew Donaldson]

Hi Juan, thanks for your reply,

We use the original iPad to do most of our testing so i don’t think it can be that.
the animations are usually only a few seconds long (10s max usually), and the video has to be as sharp as the text articles as possible, hence the high bit rate. since its only a few seconds most render out at 5Mb or so, so the magazine aint too big really.

The frame size was given to me by the designers who make all the rest of the content. To be honest ive never really questioned it! its looks good when we play it, so i haven’t really needed to test other frame sizes (except full HD, but that would make even bigger files).

Thanks for your reply. Still no real answer to why they don’t play well on some peoples devices.

[Darby Edelen]

That bitrate should not be a problem. However, some older or low end android tablets may not be able to handle high or even main profile MPEG-4/AVC.

The best way I’ve found to ensure compatibility is to encode with the baseline profile. You can still use level 5.1 for 1080p content.

Darby Edelen

[Andrew Donaldson]

Hi Darby,

Baseline profile is a feature of H264 encoding, which doesn’t seem to be supported by alot of Android tablets (crazy i know), which is why we are using FFmpeg as a blanket solution for all OS’s.

The powers at be now tell me it an Operating System problem, and its nothing to do with our encoding.
It still leaves me a bit peeved when customers complain about our videos messing everything up.

Thanks for all the replies!

[Darby Edelen]

[andrew donaldson] “Baseline profile is a feature of H264 encoding, which doesn’t seem to be supported by alot of Android tablets (crazy i know), which is why we are using FFmpeg as a blanket solution for all OS’s.”

Ah, I hadn’t considered that.

I’ve only encoded video for playback specifically on Tegra devices, but I can definitely say that H.264 baseline profile works beautifully in that case.

Are there specific tablets you’re having trouble supporting?

Darby Edelen