DicePlayer
DicePlayer is a popular video player for the Android platform.
The application differentiates itself from most rival free and
commercial video players by offering hardware acceleration for certain
video and audio containers. This enables dual core Android devices to
be able to play high definition (720p but not 1080p) MKV and AVI files
which would otherwise not be playable.
Features:
- Supports the following formats:
AVI, MOV, MKV, FLV, AVI, 3GP, 3G2, ASF, WMV, MP4, M4V, TP, TS, MTP, M2T
- Video Codecs:
- Hardware - MPEG-4, H.264, H.263
- Software - MPEG-4, H.264, RMVB, XVID, MS
MPEG-4, VP6, H.263, MPEG-1, MPEG-2
- Audio Codecs - DTS, AC3, AAC, Vorbis, FLAC, MP3, MP2, WMA
- Subtitle formats:
- SSA, SMI, SRT, AAS, UTF-16
- MKV subtitle extraction
- Wide support for subtitle encoding
- Unicode/Multibyte charset
- Transport:
- HTTP
- RTP/RTSP
- HTTP Live Streaming(Beta)
- Gestures - adjust brightness and volume
- Plugin for Tegra2 devices (such as the Samsung Galaxy Tab
10.1)
- Thumbnail images
- Play from the last paused position
- Screen lock
Of the six video players reviewed in this article, DicePlayer
is one of only two apps that reduce the Honeycomb task bar to five unobstrusive
dots.
One of the main features billed by the developers of DicePlayer is that
the hardware acceleration makes more efficient use of the battery.
However, the biggest drain on the battery is the display on devices
with large screens. Using DicePlayer on a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, we
did not see a significant increase in play time from hardware
acceleration. Nevertheless, the hardware acceleration is an incredibly
useful feature, allowing the tablet to be able to smoothly play a much
wider range of video files than would otherwise be possible. The vast
majority of 720p files we tried on the Tab played perfectly with
DicePlayer. Further, DicePlayer has much wider hardware acceleration
than the other two video app under review (MX Video Player Pro and RockPlayer)
to offer this feature.
Generally speaking, we encountered very few difficulties with
playing a
wide variety of video files although there were problems
with playing VOB files and videos encoded with the x-msvideo
codec. Overall, its compatibility was not quite as good as MX Video Player Pro.
Further, video files recorded from broadcast tv were also problematic.
As DicePlayer is missing a deinterlace feature, watching recorded
broadcast with DicePlayer showed visual defects known as interlace
artifacts.
The software uses libraries from the FFmpeg project.
Verdict:
Bereft of features, DicePlayer is still
stonkingly good. What really stands out is the implementation of
hardware acceleration which allows almost all 720p encoded files
to be played flawlessly. If you have lots of 720p media this software is
excellent.
 10/10
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Last Updated Sunday, October 02 2011 @ 03:18 AM EDT
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