Playback plagued with either video or audio issues - All stock apps

PicoPix Max Technical Topics
#1

I’m on the latest firmware and in the past few months I used the projector with a wide variety of video files/codecs. Although I believe the issues I’m going to talk about can easily go unnoticed, they do hinder my viewing experience a lot as someone fairly sensitive to playback hiccups. Using any of the stock apps for video playback, it has been impossible to get a smooth playback.

VLC, MX Player Pro, and Media Center all have flawed playback exhibiting either or both:

  • The video has a split second stutter every 2 seconds; or
  • The audio isn’t properly synced, off by about 0.5 second.

These issues are:

  • Not codec dependent. Every app has its own pattern consistent across all major video codecs and types (most common being x264 or x265 MP4s/MKVs)
  • Not speaker related. I use an aux cable speaker and confirmed the same happens with the projector’s speaker.
  • Not very noticeable at first. My partner often tells me nothing is wrong, and later can’t unsee it for the rest of the movie.
  • Not present when streaming videos. Only with the local video players (VLC, MX Player Pro, and Media Center) reading from different USB sticks.
  • Most likely to be entirely software related. Issues are very consistent and vary with each app.

All movies are read from healthy USB sticks. Every time I want to watch something, I have to decide between a smooth playback with audio desync, or slight but annoying video stutter with synced audio.

Philips, can you please reproduce the video/audio issues and look into them for a software update? I’m happy to help you troubleshoot.

User, do you have suggestions for more reliable, free video players I can install?

#2

Nova Video Player

You can find it in Aptoide TV on the PicoPix Max

#3

Thanks @Davy, I’ll give it a go and report back.
Do you also experience the issues I’m referring to?

#4

Unfortunately all the other video player apps I’ve tried, including Nova, are actually worse than the stock ones. They can’t play the audio and/or they’ll stream the video with huge lag.

After further testing, VLC comes on top because audio and video are synced well, and for most videos there is a short stutter only when subtitles are on, which is still a very big issue. The way it works is that every time VLC needs to display a new line of subtitle, it will skip a few frames of the video (micro freeze) before the subtitle is displayed.

Other stock video players are out of sync and/or skip video frames (displaying with a lower frame per second than the actual video file).

Is this just a user forum or is Philips around? I can’t believe nobody is even paying attention to these huge issues. Currently my experience is consistently poor and I prefer using my older PPX4935 which never exhibited such problems.

#5

Philips is still around, but they are being held up by a months long backlog of support tickets and shipping mishaps they are gradually resolving.

For very specific technical problems, they have asked to send an e-mail with all available explanations to support@screeneo.com, you could try that first. Or you could try to tag them again in this thread by writing an @ sign followed by their usernames: PhilipsKristina, PhilipsNono, PhilipsIvo etc.

#6

Are you using 4 corner keystone correction or manual vertical keystone?
If not, try enabling automatic keystone correction, this will greatly improve the overall performance of the system and perhaps will also smoothen video playback. With this settings, I can get smooth 10080p@60 on youtube, without it, it’s a slugfest :sweat_smile: