Movies from hard drive / USB stick stuttering

by Naquedon

I'm pretty new to Android TV so I apologise if there's an obvious answer to this. I've got a Sony Bravia TV and have attempted to watch a 1080p MP4 movie from a USB stick and a hard drive using both VLC and Arkos - which I have used before with no issues. In both apps, the Movie plays okay for a few minutes, then begins to stutter and eventually the sound is lost. I thought maybe the file was corrupt but after checking it on my laptop the file itself seems fine. Something tells me it might be the fact that the movie is 1080 and the TV is struggling to keep up somehow.

Any ideas?

nvincent

It's probably either the TV processor that is struggling, or the USB stick. Try a different USB and see if that helps?

knele

Hello, sorry from digging this thread from its grave but I have encountered the same problem on my Bravia so I was wondering if you have found a way to resolve this stuttering issue?

Everything feels smooth when using the included player that unfortunately lacks any decent subtitle and scaling options. However, when I made a switch to the VLC, my 1080p video played from the USB stick started stuttering.

I'm aware that the Sony didn't reveal the exact CPU they used in their Android TV series so it might not be the most powerful one out there but I don't want to accept that my Full HD smart TV isn't able to reproduce smooth 1080p playback from a USB stick.

Downloading the latest firmware update at the moment, let's hope for the best.

knele

For anyone stumbling upon this thread in the future ;

I solved my problem by making a switch to the MX Player. It seems that CPU in itself isn't strong enough to decode an 1080p video, MX Player offers HW+ decoding that distributes the load between both CPU and GPU ( unlike other software of the same type that oftenly offers only SW decoding ).

  • that's what I got from a quick google session at least, I'm almost completely clueless techonology-wise, so please take it with a grain of salt

Built-in video playback app also works pretty smoothly however subtitles support there is far inferior compared to the MX Player.

Type of the USB device I used ( or the port I plugged it in for that matter ) didn't seem to make any difference, however I can advise you to maybe try to relocate your files from external strorage to the TVs SD card via ES File Explorer, just in case.

In my case, VLC player was the source of all problems. Good luck.

ALSO : tweaking around in the motion settings could also result in a smoother experience, turning off " motion flow " and " movie mode" to be exact, sometimes they work great, sometimes not so much