Good MKV Player for Android Tablets?

[Dante Rising]

Everyone here was very helpful with my Handbrake issue, so I was hoping some of you might have a background in anime playback on Android devices.

Can someone recommend a good MKV player for Android? Specifically, something that can play 720 or 1080 files on a tablet such as the upcoming ASUS Transformer Prime?

I've seen some user reviews on VLC, Moboplayer, Rockplayer and Dice Player, but none mentioned MKV Anime with subtitles and 10 bit encode as a format that was tested. I'm also concerned about the quality of the playback. For example, one review mentioned that MKV files played through Moboplayer are very dark.

Thank you!

[j0x]

i guess you have to wait for VLC 1.2.0 official release because 1.2.0 version supports 10-bit playback
but makes me wonder your already re-encoding your 10-bit files to 8-bit via Handbrake so you do not need 10-bit playback at all at the moment

[sneaker]

10 bit videos are probably out of the question anyways, as the dedicated decoding logics can't decode it and the CPU would be too slow to do it in real-time, so re-encoding 10 bit to 8 bit (or download those versions in the first place, I'm sure there are re-encodes ready out there for groups that release 10 bit only) would still be required.

[mariusrhpsd]

so there's no possible way to stream let alone play 10bit from an android tablet neither?

[MeoTwister5]

I personally convert all my videos to mp4 format, and can even play 720 fine as long as it's hardware decoded. Android doesn't decode MKV very well, and I found it better to convert to mp4 to play videos well.

[Kusa-San]

BS Player is the best for 720p. I tried all the free one on my eee pad transformer and BS Player is the only one which play them fine.

EDIT : Ah it seems it doesn't work well with some of them.

EDIT 2 : Ah no, with some adjustments, it seems BS Play can play all 720p mkv well.

[Dante Rising]

Great news!

It looks like the new ASUS Transformer Prime with the Tegra 3 processor plays hi10p videos flawlessly. Just trying to figure out if it supports subtitles:

From Anandtech:

The Honeycomb video player (Gallery app) will play .mkv files.

Android File Transfer won't push over a file greater than 4GB so the first thing I tried was ripping a portion of A Quantum of Solace (BD) and sending over a 40Mbps High Profile 1080p MKV of it. The resulting 10 minute segment was 2.8GB in size and played beautifully on the Prime. There were no dropped frames and no hiccups, it just worked.

[sneaker]

High Profile is 8 bits only.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264#Profiles

[Vena]

Most of the mobile platforms (who am I kidding, all of the mobile platforms) are not going to provide you with very good .mkv playback (some of them don't even allow it) and will prefer you play things from .m4a formats. Very few mobile devices have the necessary power, even in tablet form, to provide the output necessary to decode .mkv properly. (For instance, Tegra 2 based tablets/phones will have a hard time decoding 720p 8-bit .mkv without some mucking around and/or luck. The Tegra chipset is, from what I remember, just bad at it, and I doubt that th Tegra 3 has made any significant advances.)

If you want mobile playback in .mkv (because, for some reason, you hate and/or cannot use .m4a formatting) your best bet is to find a device that can run an actual operating system (for instance ubuntu, which has been ported to several mobile devices) on which to install the current nightly build of VLC (as it runs 10 bit just fine) or madVR with MPHT. Unfortunately, though, unless you come from the future I don't think many of these devices will be able to churn out the processor heavy 10-bit encodes... HTC Edge will probably be able to do it.

[j0x]

he can also re-encode those 10-bit h264 mkv files to either 8-bit or 10-bit h264 mkv files in lower resolution like 400p
so in that way even mobile processors that can handle the next VLC player (which supports 10-bit playback) will play those videos good

higher resolution means higher computing power, so re-encoding to lower resolution will lower the computing power it needs too

[sukanime]

hmmm, trying to get Movie Player that support Hi10p and Ass Subtitile with google, get me in this thread, but no good information in here.

So i will share my experience with Hi10p
Now Tegra 3 in HTC One X can play Hi10p with MX Player in HW Mode, but not to prefect , there is some artefact on dark scenes.
Here the screenshot:
1.the artefact in dark scene


2.no artefact in normal scene


It's playing "[www.indowebster.com]-_Inu_x_Boku_SS_-_06_-1280x720_x264-Hi10P_AAC-.mkv"

There is new SoC that can play Hi10p too, it's Amlogic 8726-MX (it's caller Amlogic 8726-M6 too)
I have Ainol Novo7 Aurora II with SoC Amlogic 8726-MX, it's can play in HW Mode too in MX Player. here the screenshot ( it took with crapy handphone camera):


I hope this can help some people who looking Android Gadget that can play Hi10p

[TheFluff]

the hardware decoder doesn't support 10-bit; it decodes the video as if it was 8-bit, and that's why you get artefacts

there are no hardware decoders that support 10-bit (no, your amlogic chip does not support it; it does the same thing as your tegra chip does, even if you by dumb luck might not have seen any artefacts yet) and there will most likely never be, and the shitty arm cpu's are way too slow to decode hd resolution 10-bit h264 in software, so your only option is to suffer

or watch on a real computer, I guess

[Vena]

I've tested the Nexus 7, several of the players can decode (seemingly software decodes) 720p 10bit MKVs without much trouble, the 1080p works on some players but others struggle. There seems to be some optimization necessary for the new Jelly Bean but I'm seeing a lot of promise for 10bit.

Edit: Forgot the players tested so far:
MX Video Player ~ Hit or miss on 1080p.
DICE ~ Hit mostly.
QVideo ~ Lots of misses.
VLC ~ When it worked it worked, I don't think its properly coded for 4.1 yet.

[Village Idiot]

If I may ask, why not just conver the vids into mp4?