Full-HD Video play with Quad-Core Exynos.

A lot of people inquired about the performance of ARM Cortex A9 1.4Ghz Quad-core.

So we decided to show it with high definition video play ability.
Even the Exynos contains hardwired MPEG4/H.264/WMV decoder inside, we tried pure software driven media decoder.

We’ve tested several different 720p(HD) and 1080p(Ful-HD) video clips with MX player on ODROID-X which has Android 4.0.4.
MX player is one of the best video player in Google Play(Android Market) which is based on the famous FFMPEG media decoder.
They support Multi-core decoding with ARMv7 NEON SIMD feature. It means they utilize the 4 cores in parallel to decode video.

Most of clips could play well with ARMv7 NEON + Multi-core enabled FFMPEG codec library. It is really amazing.
The quad-core can decode Full-HD video even in a small ARM embedded board.
Seek and Sub-title functions are also working well.

Note that most clips contains H.264 video and we could use the hardware accelerated codec too in Android.
But, we performed this test without the hardware accelerator.

Please look into this video.

BTW, we have two issues.
1. Software driven video decoding makes a lot of heat due to heavy computing.
We may need to add a small heatsinks. We will measure the temperature more carefully.

2. 1080p contents in SDHC card doesn’t play well due to limited data transfer rate.
720p contents in SDHC are not a problem.
The eMMC storage has no problem because it is fast enough.

So we need more investigation the HW and SW codecs as well as burden of flash strorage access time.