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Captivate Media Capabilities

T

theman101

Lurker
Hey all, I'm thinking of getting a Samsung Captivate to replace my Treo 650/Archos 5 (4.8in pmp, the headphone jack of which died). My question is, how is the video/music player on the Captivate? I've been looking for days, and have a decent idea of the music player, but I can't find even one article or post saying anything about the media player besides the codecs/containers it can play. Can anyone vouch for its ability to play 720p h.264 or xvid videos? General comments on functionality are welcome.

I was thinking of getting an Archos 32 (low end android based pmp) for its media capabilities, but realized for about the same price I could get a captivate (and I think I'm a bit overdue in the phone arena, lol).

Any information is appreciated, thanks in advance!
 
Captivate can play 720p videos. It can play xvid video, but not entirely sure about h.264. It should be able to, but I don't usually check the encoding of my videos. (Are all avi file in h.264?)

Music player is alright. There have been some complaints about sound quality through headphones since the phone reduces the sound volume output in a non linear way when it detects a headphone (but not a speaker).
 
I encode videos using h.264 for video and mp3 for audio and then put them in an .mkv container. I works great. If I'm encoding just for the captivate, I usually reduce the resolution to better match the screen resolution. However, I have played full 720p .mkv files just fine.

The only complaint I have, and I'm not sure if it's my encoding to mp3 or the Captivate, is that I have to max out the volume to hear the video at a reasonable level. I'm going to experiment with upping the volume of the mp3 when I encode it to see if I can improve that.
 
One more question: does the music player support FLAC well? My old Archos 5 had a bit of trouble with tags, as it only supported id3, while most FLACs use their own home-baked scheme. Dose anybody know what type of tags it supports?
 
My biggest (and perhaps only) complaint about the stock media player is it doesn't respect folders. It scans them all and presents all your music and videos in one huge list.

h.264 not only works great, but is perhaps one of the best-supported codecs. I encode videos a lot to this (using an .mp4 container although as you see, .mkv is supported as well). Not sure about 720p as I encode specifically for the Captivate in order to save space.

I didn't have any Flac files so I found some and tested. They play fine.
 
sremick said:
My biggest (and perhaps only) complaint about the stock media player is it doesn't respect folders. It scans them all and presents all your music and videos in one huge list.

h.264 not only works great, but is perhaps one of the best-supported codecs. I encode videos a lot to this (using an .mp4 container although as you see, .mkv is supported as well). Not sure about 720p as I encode specifically for the Captivate in order to save space.

I didn't have any Flac files so I found some and tested. They play fine.
Click to expand...

What? You mean I can't make music playlists and stuff?
 
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