player freeze when playing from stream

[jdesmedt]

Hello

I have written a videoplayer in J2ME that can play large videofiles (up to 10Mb). The problem is that when I play the video with a player that is created from a local url (Manager.createPlayer (file:///c:/filepath)) everything works fine; but when I create the player from a stream the player has a point in the video where the player has a buffering_started event and stops playing.
The point where the video stops playing is always the same for the same video, but differs when playing other videos.
HAs anyone encountered this problem or know why this happens.

Thanks

[Steel_BRS]

Hi jdesmedt

It's probably a bug in the firmware - have you tested your midlet on other handsets?

/Steel

[jdesmedt]

I have tested the application with the Nokia 6500 classic and 6500 slide. Both phones show the same behaviour.

[Steel_BRS]

I have tested the application with the Nokia 6500 classic and 6500 slide. Both phones show the same behaviour.

These are both Series 40, 5th Ed., FP1. I would try testing on a Sony Ericsson handset, maybe a Series 60 Nokia, etc.
Just to check whether a large range of devices have problems with the video files - if so, there might be encoding errors in them.

[jdesmedt]

I have tested this succesfully on other devices (not of Nokia) and it works fine. Is it possible that the phones can't handle the amount of data? The file is downloaded while the player is playing, but when the download is finished, the stream that the player reads from contains about 5Mb.
Through testing i have seen that lowering the bitrate of the video results (most of the time) in the video playing a bit longer.

[Steel_BRS]

Is it possible that the phones can't handle the amount of data?

That is a very serious possibility. Let me give you an example of my memory problem:
In my midlet I'm drawing a graph, and for that I need a large integer-array: int[width*height]
Nokia JVMs have 2.048 kb of heap space. Sony Ericsson's only have 1.024 kb of heap space. So you would think that Nokias would give fewer OutOfMemoryErrors, right?

I developed my graph and tested it on a SE K800i. I actually allocate int[(2*width)*(2*height)] in order to obtain some simple antialiasing. This works every time in SE JVMs. However when I started testing it on Nokia 3110 Classic, 5200, 5310 XpressMusic and 6500 classic, I got OutOfMemoryErrors on the devices with 240x320 pixel display (5310 and 6500).

So the workaround I had to make was:

try
  allocate double display size
catch OutOfMemoryException
  try
    allocate display size
  catch OutOfMemoryException
    write('Not enough memory for graph')

I always get an antialiased graph on Sony Ericssons with high resolution (240x320), but I'm lucky if I get a graph at all on Nokias with 240x320 resolution.