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Help Cannot get any videos to play

A

arcarcarc

Lurker
Are you ready for this? Firstly, I am no newbie but I am utterly stumped with this and am losing the will to live.

I have installed:

MoboPlayer
BSPlayer
MXPlayer
Zimly
VitalPlayer
iMPlayer+
RockPLayer Lite

And I cannot get a single one of them to play any video!!!!

I have used Freemake to convert .avi and .mkv to mp4. I have used H.264 for video and ACC and mp3 for the audio. I have downloaded and tried Leawo Total Video Converter, Handbrake, and Next Video Converter.

And still I cannot get a format to play. I get a black bar on the screen telling me that the format is not recognised or it simply states that the video cannot be player.

I can watch YouTube no problem.

Please, I have tried and tried and tried to help myself before troubling experts on this forum.

But can someone save my sanity?

I am close to doing a factory reset and starting all over again with installing apps and the like.

Aaaaaargh!!!
 
Hmmmm - I have been able to run all of those formats on my Acer using MX player.

My Wifes Asus has the same problem....and it was ROM related. I changed it up and everything worked great.

What are you running...custom or stock. May I suggest thors 170 ICS....it is ROCK solid....
 
Thank you for your reply.

I am running the stock rom and have not tinkered with it at all.

I am now trying to use Magic Video Converter and HD Video Converter Factory Pro to prepare another couple of movies to test in a couple of hours time.

Do you really think that it is worth flashing to ROM?
 
Just followed some links and I might give it a go. I have an Asus TF201 arriving in a few days time and was just trying to set up my old A500 for my girlfriend. She will want to play music and watch movies and get a ton of apps on board. For me the tablet was just a workhorse for quickly working on the go.

So I might have a go at flashing the rom. If I screw it up then I've lost nothing - although my girlfriend might not be too happy.

Got this link and will follow the vid at the bottom:

http://www.*************s.net/forum...6738-thor-a500-rom-v14-2-android-3-2-1-a.html

But I would so much prefer to get a tweak or a twist for it as it stands before I resort to such measures.
 
I had problems getting the A500 to play mp4 encoded videos that played flawlessly on my PC and even my old OG Droid. Like you, I tried various video player apps and the one that seems to work for my unrooted A500 running ICS is MX Player (which I see included in the list of video players you have already tried). For my A500, I also had to install the MX Player Codec (ARMv7) app, which I guess is designed to work with the graphics processor in the A500. And in the MX Player app itself, I guess the H/W decoder did not work because the video did not play until I checked the "S/W decoder" option in the "Decoder" section of the app's "Settings".

Also, the program I used to convert the video to mp4 was Handbrake. But my settings for the conversion did not use H264 for the video. I think I had problems getting it to play on the A500 using that video codec. I used MPEG-4 (FFmpeg) for the video and the converted mp4 works fine on my A500. I don't know if the quality of the video is worst using that codec since I am not knowledgeable about that stuff, but maybe you can try converting a short video using that codec on Handbrake and testing to see if that may work on your A500 before, as you say, resorting to more drastic measures. Good luck!
 
The latest thrilling installment - I did a factory reset because I wondered if I had an app that might have been causing glitches (I'm clutching at straws with that one!)

Installed MX player and tried to play back one of the converted films - no go.

Installed Mobo player and did the same - no go.

I put two standard .avi films from my archive on the external sd card - no go.

So I downloaded my ninth piece of video conversion software - DVD Video Soft and accepted the Android conversion option. I did change it from H264 to FFmpeg and had the audio to match.

But it doesn't play on my A500.

Do I give up?

Or can someone send me a DropBox link to a video that they have used on their A500 and see if it works on mine?

Or any other sensible suggestions....?
 
Whooppeeeee!

I have discovered RapFox player and, Houston, we have a movie player that works on my Acer A500!

So far it has played the one that I mentioned above - converted to FFmpeg it is currently playing an .avi that is unchanged (woohoo), an .mkv but it didn't like an mp4 that I stuck in.

So, hear the name: RapFox player with the VFP3 codec. The only thing is that its file tree does not allow me to access the external sd but, hey, small beer!
 
Okay, it looks like I need to amend the information I previously posted about viewing mp4 videos on the A500. I had not "played" with encoding and adding new videos to the A500 since well before ICS was pushed to the A500 so I don't know if that update had anything to do with what I found out just now about playing videos on the A500 or if my A500 was just glitchy before ICS, but now it looks like a H264/AAC encoded video will play absolutely fine on the stock Video Player on the A500!

I grabbed a youtube video that was in HD format (1280x720) that was encoded in H264/AAC and placed the file in the A500. It played flawlessly using the stock Video Player in the A500. Then I took a brief video clip from a decrypted DVD in vob format (720x480) and converted that, once again using the H264/AAC format, and that played perfectly in the A500 as well. I don't know if maybe the stock Video Player in the A500 might have been changed since the ICS update to allow flawless rendering of the H264/AAC coded files now or I was just doing something different/wrong before. In any case, those two test mp4 files work great in my A500.

Now, if you go looking for the stock Video Player in the A500 in the App Drawer, you will not find it. It looks like this video playing app is only triggered when you try to play a video on the A500. So how do you access and play the video files you placed in your A500? In my case, I installed a file manager app to be able to view files in a sort of "Windows folder structure" way which allowed me to go directly to the video files. Then when I selected the video file, the A500 would recognize it as a video file and proceed to activate the stock Video Player to play it. If you have a 3rd party video player app like MX Player installed, then when you select that video file, you would be given the option to select to play the file using either the stock Video Player or the MX Player. With the test videos files I had, both the stock Video Player and the MX Player played them fine. I use Astro File Manager, but I believe other file manager files like ES File Explorer work just as well.

arcarcarc: I am going to PM you with the Dropbox urls for the two mp4 test files I used that played fine on the stock Video Player of my A500. Try them (using Astro or some other file manager app to access them) and let me know if they play on your A500.
 
Big thanks to SBMom93. Yes, both videos have played perfectly well in the stock player when saved on the internal sd. The trailer video played perfectly from the external sd but the BBT excerpt jumped to 24 seconds and was blocky. Maybe I will need to format the card and reload it.

That said, with 32GB of internal storage I only need or want 10-15 films onboard at a time and can use the external sd for documents.

Tis great to have such helpful people around as SBMom93!

By the way, out of interest, RapFox is not offered as a video player when I select a movie file via file manager. Interesting....?
 
arcarcarc said:
Big thanks to SBMom93. Yes, both videos have played perfectly well in the stock player when saved on the internal sd. The trailer video played perfectly from the external sd but the BBT excerpt jumped to 24 seconds and was blocky. Maybe I will need to format the card and reload it.

That said, with 32GB of internal storage I only need or want 10-15 films onboard at a time and can use the external sd for documents.

Tis great to have such helpful people around as SBMom93!

By the way, out of interest, RapFox is not offered as a video player when I select a movie file via file manager. Interesting....?
Click to expand...

You're very welcome, and I'm just glad I was able to offer some helpful advice given my very limited knowledge about the android system. Mostly the info I have is from my own hit-or-miss experience with trying to get something to work on my own android cellphone or tablet.

Yeah, I noticed that "quirk" of RapFox not coming up as an available app/program when a valid video file has been selected for viewing. When you mentioned that you found RapFox to be a worthy video player but that it did not seem to offer an option to access a video file stored on the memory card - as opposed to the file being stored in the internal memory, I downloaded and installed the app myself to check it out. I definitely did not see any function or setting within the RapFox app that would direct it to look in the memory card for video files. I thought that using a file manager app like Astro to access the memory card-stored video files would bypass that internal memory only restriction, but, yep, the app options for viewing a video file stored on the memory card, when accessed by the file manager app, only yielded the stock Video Player and MX Player (which I have installed on my A500) but NO RapFox (which I did install for the test). Definitely strange.
 
I just downloaded MX Player, then installed the ARMv7 Neon codec, played MX Player and it downloaded the ARMv7 codec. It seems to happily recognise almost all of the films on my Acer, which is very strange as it wouldn't play any of them.

I have the same film on the internal and the external SD card - it plays that version on the internal but not the external. It will play some of the films on the external, so it isn't a problem per se with the SD card. I also have a TV series in a folder on the external SD card and just episode one of that series on the internal. Again, it happily plays the one episode on the internal but will not play any of the episodes in the folder on the external. I am guessing that it has an issue with a folder inside a folder on the external but am yet to test it by dragging an episode out of the folder and dropping it straight on the card. I did try to do that with long hold and move but the A500 had a bit of a moan about that.

Well, my new Asus TF201 arrives tomorrow afternoon so I look forward to having all of this fun all over again with another machine!!!
 
Brand new Walmart Go Phone ATT Fusion

I can play youtube videos


"Cannot play video Sorry, this video cannot be played"

It only applies to Sprint "See what your phone is dreaming link"
 
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