Much of this information pertains to the Diamond as well, however for the moment I'm gearing this write up to the Touch Pro crowd.
I've noticed a lot of threads discussing video performance on these devices, however very few actually go into detail and explain why certain things will get you better performance. I'm NOT an HTC engineer or anything (ie. I'm not responsible for the accuracy of this information) however I've been around the block with mobile platforms, and hopefully some of you will find this useful/interesting.
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Fact: The Qualcomm MSM chips in our phones are
VERY capable of displaying full-sized full-motion VGA video.
Problem: It can't be done with the standard video driver methods (DirectDraw, GDI, etc).
Whether this is because of a driver mismatch or perhaps a limitation of the hardware is a different story altogether (I honestly think either one could be true- VGA is a lot of pixels), however the point is that you will NOT get compelling video using those methods.
Solution: Qtv driver
Qualcomm has created its own proprietary video delivery driver, called
Qtv. Qtv actually delivers full hardware accelerated video performance on Qualcomm based CPUs, and will easily outperform DirectDraw or any other method when it comes to pumping video.
Problem: Since its proprietary and only compatible with Qualcomm CPUs, most major video players (DivX mobile, TCPMP, etc) do NOT offer it.
So, you are stuck with DirectDraw at best, and that will without a doubt drop frames when playing VGA-sized video.
Solution: Qtv IS supported by the bundled software in HTC devices (Windows Media Player, HTC Album, YouTubePlayer, etc).
I feel like most people in this forum have a natural dislike for the bloated WMP (I include myself in that boat), so many of us have been reluctant to try this. However, after some initial skepticism, I have to admit this is one of those rare occasions that WMP will actually play a video BETTER than the third party players.
Even better than WMP, however, is HTC Album. Normally used just for pictures taken with the device's camera, Album also supports playing back videos recorded in the camera's MP4 format.
It doesn't HAVE to be taken from the camera, however- any video compressed into MP4 (check out this easy
GUI encoder over at XDA) will play fine, although you may need to drop it into "My Documents\My Videos" to show up in the list.
Problem: Mp4-only is sort of annoying? What about DivX? Or alternative players using Qtv?
Problem is, Qtv is proprietary and owned by Qualcomm. They won't give out the code unless you pay for the licensing fees. That's why only the HTC bundled apps use it at the moment.
Coreplayer 1.3 sort of supports QtV, however. I say sort of because they don't REALLY have full acceleration (decoding, drawing, etc), but rather figured out enough of it to create a Qtv hardware
overlay. You may have heard of
overlays from PC DVD/video player apps which use the graphics card hardware to scale and draw video to a dedicated area of the screen, freeing up the CPU to do other things. The Qtv overlay works in much of the same way- it creates a bounding box that Qtv uses to display the video as decoded from the CPU. This is as opposed to FULL hardware acceleration, in which much of the decoding is offset to the video hardware as well, freeing up even more CPU time.
The end result? You can get pretty darned good DivX playback with CorePlayer 1.3 using Qtv video method, however it is not as accelerated as Mp4 with HTC Album (in fact, Mp4 in Coreplayer 1.3 still lags and drops many frames).
The only problem with Coreplayer's overlay method is that when using Video Out of the Touch Pro, it will create a blue flicker. This is NOT a problem with Qtv, but I beleive rather the overlay updating due to this half-way method of pumping out frames. Hopefully CorePlayer will find a way around this in the next version, or even better- get the real full acceleration from Qualcomm!
NOTE: Do NOT try using Qtv on the earlier versions of CorePlayer unless you have a Fuze. In v1.1, they introduced Qtv in beta stage, however the GSM Qualcomm chips use slightly different code than CDMA ones. Version 1.1 supported only the GSM version, which would only display a blank screen on CDMA devices, and sometimes even lock up the device.
Hope this makes sense, and let me know if you found this info useful.