Occasional Video Pixelation and Audio/Video Sync Issues

[JCo352]

Well 2.1 fixed the issue for me. I am very pleased.

 

[nyijedi]

Well 2.1 fixed the issue for me. I am very pleased.

That's great to hear, but are you sure that it's fixed with 2.1? I'm not calling you a liar, it's just that other troubleshooting steps in the past resulted in me *thinking* I had the issue fixed, but it would eventually happen again. When you get a chance, do you mind taking a few test videos with high movement (I usually move the camera around quickly and take shots of various things) to see if 2.1 has really resolved the issue? I'm still waiting on 2.1, but I'm very excited to hear that it may have solved this annoying problem.

 

[JCo352]

Well 2.1 fixed the issue for me. I am very pleased.

That's great to hear, but are you sure that it's fixed with 2.1? I'm not calling you a liar, it's just that other troubleshooting steps in the past resulted in me *thinking* I had the issue fixed, but it would eventually happen again. When you get a chance, do you mind taking a few test videos with high movement (I usually move the camera around quickly and take shots of various things) to see if 2.1 has really resolved the issue? I'm still waiting on 2.1, but I'm very excited to hear that it may have solved this annoying problem.

I've done about three test videos so far. Each one has come out very nice, no pixelation at all. This was the first thing I checked besides the browser scroll lag(which also got fixed). I moved the phone around a lot and went from low light to a lot of light and
still no problems, and this is coming from every video I made had this problem. Also if you want 2.1 just install the update.zip, like I did it was very easy, and is totally worth it to not wait.

 

[nyijedi]

That's awesome. Thanks for sharing.

And I didn't even know that the update.zip has been posted. Thanks! I'm going to do that today (I manually updated to 2.0.1 so it shouldn't be a problem).

 

[dbok]

Still Fails on Android 2.1

I've taken the 2.1 update (Settings | About phone | Firmware version is "2.1-update1"), but still suffer the described issues: pixellation, loss of synchronization between audio and video.

If transfer the video via USB cable to my Linux PC and play with mplayer, it complains of a corrupted file.

The videos I've seen this occur on are high quality, at least 2 minutes long, though the problem occurs just a few seconds into the beginning of the video.

 

[JCo352]

I've taken the 2.1 update (Settings | About phone | Firmware version is "2.1-update1"), but still suffer the described issues: pixellation, loss of synchronization between audio and video.

If transfer the video via USB cable to my Linux PC and play with mplayer, it complains of a corrupted file.

The videos I've seen this occur on are high quality, at least 2 minutes long, though the problem occurs just a few seconds into the beginning of the video.

Damn that sucks bro, the update totally cleared up the issue for me. I used to get it in every video, now no videos have this problem. Maybe try a battery pull?

 

[Jonny Kansas]

I've only recorded a handful of videos since purchasing my Droid in November, but every one has been in varying degrees of light (daylight, indoors, outside at night). Haven't noticed this issue.

Wondering if it's the SD card as someone suggested. Could some people post up what brand they have? Also wondering if the "batch" that the phone comes from has anything to do with it. That info, I believe, is found under the battery. I'm on my Droid now, or I'd check.

In any case, this has peaked my curiosity, so I'll be playing around with video tomorrow to see what I can determine with my own Droid...

 

[maladroid]

I've only recorded a handful of videos since purchasing my Droid in November, but every one has been in varying degrees of light (daylight, indoors, outside at night). Haven't noticed this issue.

Wondering if it's the SD card as someone suggested. Could some people post up what brand they have? Also wondering if the "batch" that the phone comes from has anything to do with it. That info, I believe, is found under the battery. I'm on my Droid now, or I'd check.

In any case, this has peaked my curiosity, so I'll be playing around with video tomorrow to see what I can determine with my own Droid...

I'm glad I was finally pointed in the direction of this thread because I thought I was the only one having this problem, and it's been driving me crazy!

Like someone else mentioned before, the 5.0mp camera with "DVD Quality Video Recording" (right...) is one of the main reasons I was excited to have Droid in the first place. Now I barely ever record video, knowing that the recording will just come out disappointingly bad

Anyway, I finally cracked today and just ordered a Class 6 micro SD off Newegg. My best guess as to why this problem persists is that the Droid is having trouble keeping up the dump of the video feed to the SD card, and I'm finally willing to put down $60 just on the chance that this might fix the problem, because it is super, super annoying. I feel less video-capable with my Droid right now than when I was rocking my last phone, LG Dare

I'll let everyone here know how it goes with the new SD card once it arrives. Right now I give myself 50/50 odds that it will actually help fix this issue...fingers crossed

 

[Orakle]

Ok so I think I might have found a possible culprit for this. This is just my theory, feel free to prove me wrong. As stated in other threads the Droid comes with two different types of sd cards, a sandisk, and a generic one. Is it possible that the generic sd card isn't perfroming up to standards? Maybe when recording directly onto the card things get messed up. If anyone that has this problem could check their sd card and see which one you have, and anyone that doesnt have this problem do the same, maybe we could prove my theory right?

I think that you are right about the SD Card Theory. I took my SD Card to check like you said and I have a Generic one. Not only that I took it out blew on it, put the SD card back and it Took a better video. Before this EVERY video was coming out wrong. I'm gon Invest in a Higher Quality SD Card...:icon_ banana::motdroidhoriz::blackdroid::motdroidhoriz::blackdroid:

 

[ginad]

So glad to have this also. I am trying to do a video blog with my Droid. I need to be able to do video. Is there any confirmation to the SD card theory?

Maladroid what are your results?

 

[nyijedi]

So glad to have this also. I am trying to do a video blog with my Droid. I need to be able to do video. Is there any confirmation to the SD card theory?

Maladroid what are your results?

Unfortunately, I can confirm that the SD card is not the cause of the problem. I actually have had a class 6 microSD card in my Droid since launch day, and the problem happens with that card (I also tried the stock microSD card and it happened there as well). Personally, I've given up on this, as I'm convinced it's a hardware problem.

My Droid is capable of shooting perfect videos, but the pixelation/sync issue randomly happens on about 40% of the videos I take.

 

[Duck141]

run kill it all before shooting and video.

 

[Maladroid2]

So glad to have this also. I am trying to do a video blog with my Droid. I need to be able to do video. Is there any confirmation to the SD card theory?

Maladroid what are your results?

Hey, sorry I didn't respond earlier but I can no longer log in with my original account for some reason... Not sure what happened there

Anyway, my Class 6 arrive on Friday, and I can say that yes, it did definitely cut down on the amount of video distortion/pixelation, but not 100% fixed.

I still get that one annoying scramble in the beginning sometimes, but after that the rest of the video is largely smooth, at least to the point where I don't feel like just erasing every video I take because it is unwatchable.

Now, I'm going to qualify this by saying that I don't know for sure that my Class 2 card was working perfectly to begin with, and perhaps even just getting a Class2 replacement might have helped me, but I just figured if I was going to spend my money on one of those, may as well go all the way.

Therefore, yes, it did make a marked improvement, but I can't tell you for sure if it was just a change from possibly defective card to working card, or from working class 2 card to working class 6 card.

 

[brochaos]

guys it almost has to be a resource issue. can someone else double check what i just noticed. i had just done 3 or 4 test videos, that were all choppy. i went and looked at my running services, (i don't even know exactly what all the numbers mean) and the avail was going between 12-14.

then i got sidetracked, and updated my htc keyboard, and switched input methods to it. this had the side effect of unloading the swype service that i was using before. not sure if swype has a memory leak or what not, but now my available is 33. nothing else has changed, and all the other programs running are still the same.

i just did about 6 new test vids, lots of movement, brightness changes, etc, and not one of pixelated for even a second.

 

[brochaos]

ok just did some more testing. and now i know what those numbers mean at the bottom =). after a while, my phone always seems to hover around 12-14 mb free. obviously android is keeping stuff in RAM, even if it is not being needed. it can dump it if more RAM is needed.

opened up camcorder, recorded a video, played it back, choppy about 3 times in 30 seconds. closed camcorder. checked memory, now it's at 33 again! so obviously android was trying to free stuff up, but it didn't help at first. go right back into camcorder, record the exact same clip again, and this time not a single choppy.

it looks like android isn't clearing enough ram, or enough ram fast enough, to keep the video from being choppy. but once the ram is clean, then videos will record clean from then on.