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Google is a mess of yes and no's so I thought I would ask here;
if I have an h265 encoded video (4K) and put it on an SD card. are there tablets that can play the video through kodi?
I've been looking at the Samsung Galaxy Tab A, my basic knowledge tells me a 1.6GHz 8 core CPU should be able to but I read on a plex forum that users were having trouble with even 1080p.
Thanks
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I've done a significant amount more research on the subject and its a real head-scratcher.
With very few exceptions, you cant purchase a tablet that has the hardware to support 1080p h265 10bit for under ~$500-600, nvm 4k.
Yet in 2014 for $50 you could buy a micro PC chip (RPI like) that could.
Very strange
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I've successfully tested 720p h265 on a lower spec Amazon Fire HD8, but it was very selective on which compression settings it would play. And I had zero success with any 1080p h265 videos, nvm 10bit.
googling around people do report flawless playback from $500+ dollar tablets... I just can't figure out why that's the case?
When I say lower-spec its miles above the $50 RPI like devices I spoke of.
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2019-12-05, 04:56
(This post was last modified: 2019-12-05, 05:01 by apeg.)
Here is what I've been able to put together.
It would seem recent tablets, even lower-powered ones are capable of 1080p h265 10bit playback, but not via HW acceleration. For both Kodi and VLC player with hardware acceleration enabled I was only able to get playback from some of my 720p encodes. Even then I suspect it was only low bitrate encodes, but I didn't test enough to verify. The moment I disabled hardware acceleration I was able to get 1080p h265 10bit to play flawlessly.
My assumption from here was the CPU would be less power efficient than the GPU at decoding, but to my surprise testing with a 1080p video, there wasn't a significant difference.
A big win for android tablets in my mind... But I'm and still blown away how this information is not readily available, and even more so with the shotty HW decoders being used. I understand its a low-cost game, but my $50, 2014 released RPI like device handles 1080p without issue.
Very strange. I hope this helps someone else.
