windows iot video playback on dragonboard 410c

Question

I'm running the digital signage sample provided here (http://ms-iot.github.io/content/en-US/win10/StartCoding.htm) on a dragonboard 410c. I've just got for evaluation and video playback stutters and pauses.

I also, tried a simple app that just plays a local mp4 from the mediaplayer control with similar results.

System processor never goes anywhere near 100%, so I don't think i'm at a hardware limitation.

Does windows uses the hardware video decoder provided by QUALCOMM? Are there some visual studio configuration items which I'm missing to allow for smooth playback? Any other suggestions?

Answer 1

The current released version of Window IoT does NOT utilize hardware acceleration, unfortunately you will get extremely low frame-rate playback at best.

Answer 2

Actually the above answer about hardware acceleration in this case is incorrect. That applies to the Raspberry Pi devices. Video playback on Minnowboard is accelerated and works perfectly with audio and video. Video playback on the Dragonboard 410C works perfectly as well, as long as there is no audio track over the HDMI port. You can strip the audio track to test - it plays 720p videos fine all day. I have read that you can use audio as well if you use an external 3.5mm adapter to bypass audio over HDMI, but I have not tested that solution myself. Microsoft is aware of the issue and is looking into a possible resolution - though they give no timeline or guarantee.

Answer 3

Stripping off audio just to get things working is not really feasible when you have to work with advertising companies. The hardware acceleraton on the 410c seems suboptimal. It's only about 3 times faster than the PI3 which is running with software rendering. Shaders crash at random on the 410c, that's with v *.14322 of the OS. You quickly discover the OS if fragile and unfinished when you start pushing on the edges. If you run headless, and use the 410c as a compute engine things look good. Try to stack two slightly complicated shaders back to back and twiddle properties in real time ...