The most important criteria when looking at a media player is the performance. If the app can’t get the job done, it should go straight into the garbage can. Androids are not yet as powerful as desktop computers or laptops. There are only a couple of truly sophisticated smart phones like the HTC Desire or the Samsung Galaxy S with its1-Ghz of pure power. Power is the single most important thing when watching films and clips in HD, so you shouldn’t expect too much from a mobile movie player. All of these thoughts were in the back of my mind when I first put Rockplayer to the ultimate test.
In my search for high quality test films, I stumbled upon sites such as Microsoft.com-HD WMV or DivX.com-HD Content.
Rockplayer didn’t have any problem playing small films in relatively low resolution. They played smoothly and cleanly with a clear picture and good sound.
DivX
- Resolution: 720x384 px
- H264 Image Compression
- MP3 Audio
MOV
- Resolution: 852x354 px
- H264 Image Compression
- AAC Audio
Xvid
- Resolution: 1024*576 px
- MPEG4 Image Compression
- AC3 Audio
Anything with a resolution over 600p is usually the cut-off point for most Android devices like the HTC Desire. As soon as everything starts to lag and twitch, you can forget about enjoying watching a movie.
DivX
- Resolution: 1280x528
- H264 Image Compression
- AAC Audio
Xvid
- Resolution: 1280x720
- MPEG4 Image Compression
- AAC Audio
At this point the sound cut out and the image became blurry and jerky.
Full HD files were what completely killed Rockplayer. There the image jerked around like crazy. And what about the sound? Forget about it because there simply wasn’t any. All you could hear was a high-pitched noise that made me almost lose my hearing.
I have to say that there are a couple of small details that make watching films with Rockplayer vaguely enjoyable. Among these is a seek feature, which let’s you find the spot where you left off watching. With the press of a button, the video and audio format of your file is displayed
Rockplayer doesn’t organize your movies according to genre, title or artist like your typical audio player, but rather shows them in the actual folders they are saved to on your SD card memoery. This way you can organize your movies yourself and spare yourself all the searching hassle. Feel free to use Rockplayer for playing music files. Although it’s not its primary function, it works well as a music player.
Another cool thing about Rockplayer is the fact that you can scale your movies down to the correct size, even the ones in 4:3 formats. Nothing gets skewed or stretched – Rockplayer cuts off any unneeded edges to make it fit perfectly onto the Android screen.
When watching a movie with a 400-600p resolution and a length of about 90 minutes, around 50% of your battery life gets used up. You definitely won’t be able to fit in two movies into one battery charge, but watching a full-length feature film isn’t a problem at all. I had my HTC Desire in Airplane Mode during this test, so my phone didn’t have any communication with the outside world.
Bottom Line:
In the end, it’s not really worth it watching full HD movies on mobile devices at the moment despite the increasing demand for it. The time for these kinds of movies hasn’t come yet given the need for enormous memory and super powerful performance. According to the Rockplayer developers, Androids like the HTC Desire with its gigahertz of power can play 500p videos smoothly. Weaker devices should stick to 400p videos. I recommend that you trim down the size of your film using a converter before transferring it to your SD card.
Rockplayer performs pretty well as the only app so far that can play DivX and other commonly used formats. Let me be quite honest here: I don’t know half of the formats listed on their website. All I can say is, it’s cool to finally have the equivalent of a VLC player for Android.
(16,189)
(5,748)
You must log in or register now,
to submit a comment!
As a logged in user, you can also change the order of the comments.