In my observation, there is a big difference between the internal video playback and external sources such as a Raspberry Pi and Amazon Firestick. This is in terms of smoothness and picture quality.
Regarding smoothness, I expected the PPM to have better if not the same performance as my Raspberry Pi but at the moment, PPM feels sluggish and video playback is not 100% smooth.
Regarding the picture quality, external sources are so far a lot better and gives you the wow factor that you’re having that kind of quality from a small package. Using the internal playback though feels like you are convincing yourself that it looks good enough
Here are 2 pictures that I think will give a good view to show the difference.
Note: Exact same video file was used and both in Normal mode.
External via HDMI - OSMC (Kodi variant) running on a Raspberry pi 3B
As you can see, the internal video playback seems to be too dark and some details are gone I guess because of this.
The question is, is this the fault of the GPU? Is this something that can be fixed perhaps in the GPU driver?
@kugiigi Thanks for attaching the example pictures.
I will be investigating this. It’s not something I observed before in my testing, but enough people have reported it now. Let me get back to you on this.
Although if you look at the output from internal content you’ll notice that you can read the label on her headphones whereas for external you simply can’t because it’s blown out. @kugiigi@Philips_Support_P
Yeah, I noticed that too but that could be just that the frames aren’t exactly the same or just the camera. I’ll check this exact scene again on my RPi.
A split seconds difference I think, as you can see there’s a bit difference in the angle of her head. Anyway, I’ll try to check this scene again when I get the chance
I was really scared for a moment you were going to say it was the other way around.
One question is if it shows up on other players, like Netflix. It could just be that this movie player app isn’t so great. At least with Android we can download others.
No, this is the case on anything in the internal system.
About the headphone label, I went back to that scene and there’s definitely some frames where there’s a reflection on it thus, the one from external shows just white
Something weird happened to my PPM last night.
I was watching Netflix and in the middle of the movie, the video hangs but the audio continues to play.
It won’t continue even after reselecting the video. I also tried Youtube and it won’t play as well so I thought my internet connection is broken. However, it seems fine and only streaming isn’t working. I tried playing a local video and after a few seconds of playback my PPM hanged and I had to a hard reset.
After rebooting, it’s the same, Youtube and Netflix won’t play a video so I tried again a local video on MX Player and it played without locking up my PPM this time but I noticed that it was using software rendering (SW) so I changed it to hardware (HW) but it was just black. In my mind, probably the GPU driver kinda crashed so only software rendering is working. But what I noticed is that the video I’m playing doesn’t seem to be as dark as before. I thought that maybe software rendering is the reason so when I rebooted again my PPM and video playback returned to normal, I tried to play the video again on MX Player but now using HW. To my surprise, it is still better than the result I posted here!
Here’s a photo of almost the same scene playing on MX Pro via the internal system.
I still can’t assess if it’s already on par with my firestick but it definitely feels like playback color looks better now. I’m confused right now and would be testing more later
Guess what, I tried it again last night and the darkness came back!
This is really weird. What do you think is happening?
I tried SW, HW and HW+ on MX Player but all are the same and even on VLC or Media Center.
