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Help Tablet crashes when trying to play a video

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Android Question

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When my tablet kept crashing all the apps and returning to the desktop, I reset it to factory defaults.
It helped with the app crashing, but the tablet stopped being able to play videos. When I try to play a video (either from the Gallery or from File manager), the screen just goes dark with a Dell logo, and doesn't react until it's rebooted.
I tried .mp4 and .3gp formats, both of which used to work perfectly fine before. Pictures still work fine, the only problem is with videos.

I'm working on Dell Venue 7 3730 with Android 4.4.2. I checked for system updates and the system says it's up to date.

Can anyone help?
 
eitatetaata said:
It still seems strange to me that the stock player would crash the system, but VLC works. Thank you very much!
Click to expand...
Most likely the stock player for the default 4.4.2 media player only includes a set number of codecs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codec
Media viewers like VLC or MX Player that are well known to be able to play a really wide range of video file types include a much larger range of codecs. A video file like a .mp4 actually consists of a video stream and an audio stream, and both the video and the audio when being encoded can use a variety of different codecs. (i.e. the video is h.264 and the audio is mp3). A media player, whether it's the default Android player or a third-party player like VLC, when opening that mp4 file has to 'decode' the video and the audio so you can see it on your phone. The chances are when the default media player couldn't open those mp4 or 3gp files it was just a matter of one or more missing codecs. MX Player and VLC will tell you what codecs are used in whichever file you're watching -- dig into their menus and look for something referring to Properties or File Info.
 
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