Two Qs about Apps for Android

[Faith20879]

Hi,

I know there are several tech savvy residents here. I am new to the world of android tablets and would greatly appreciate your pointers.

1. My camera takes films in .avi format and my tablet plays .mp4 only. I believe I need to either get an app that plays avi or convert my files to .mp4. Could you tell me what the pros and cons are for these options?
2. Is .avi format being phased out?
3. I have a free app called Mahjong. The tablet’s battery usage summary says the Mahjong is constantly using 4% of the power even when I am not playing. I tried the "Force Stop" but the summary remains unchanged. Does this mean Mahjong is eating away my battery? Is this cause of concern?

Thanks in advance,
Faith

[paulsiu]

1. Both avi and mp4 are essentially media containers. It's the format that's stored inside the container that matters. For example, a 720p movie stored in an avi will have the same quality of a 720p movie stored in mp4. I am guessing that your camera will use the same encoding for both avi and mp4 so there is no advantage or disadvantage of using either.

2. The power app probably takes an average of power over a time period, so if you kill off the Majong it will take a while for the numbers to go down. If it's not running, it's not taking up power.

Paul

[Quickfoot]

Regarding question #1, AVI and MP4 are different video formats, paul is correct that they are containers but a 720p movie in AVI is NOT necessarily the same quality as an MP4 (it is almost always less quality) and if it is the same quality it is almost always going to be a much larger file. The reason for this is video codecs use different amounts of storage to store a video, the older and less efficient codecs require MUCH more space for the same quality. For example MPEG 2 (the codec DVDs use) requires up to 4 times more space for roughly the same video quality that MPEG 4 (what Blu Ray uses) offers.

A note about resolution, 720P / 1080P do NOT refer to quality but rather the resolution of the video, the compression rate and the codec used affect quality of videos of the same resolution. A 1080P file streamed on Netflix / Amazon / Itunes (~ 5 mbit/s) is MUCH lower quality than a Blu Ray disc (30 to 40 mbit/s).

Nearly all consumer phones / tablets and digital camcorders use H264 or another MPEG 4 variant today. You can use a free program called Handbrake (http://www.handbrake.fr) to convert AVI files to Mpeg 4 (which is usually actually using H264).

[ourbrooks]

Search for .avi player android. You'll get hits for some very highly rated players that will play either .avi files or .mp4 files or a large number of other formats. That way, you won't have to worry about whether or not to keep the .avi file or not.

[kenschmidt]

Avidemux is another pretty nice program for converting AVI to MP4. It takes advantage of the container thing and so is very fast for converting.

http://download.cnet.com/Avidemux/3000- ... 29933.html

[GeauxBR]

https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... r.ad&hl=en

MX PLayer can pretty much play anything you throw at it.

[statsnerd]

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mxtech.videoplayer.ad&hl=en

MX PLayer can pretty much play anything you throw at it.

I just wanted to give a huge +1 to this. I use MX Player all the time and I find it to be like VLC player on my laptop. Any format I throw at it, it will play.

[Faith20879]

Thank you for the valuable points.

XM Player seems to be the winner. ...Off to the foxes now!

Thanks again,
Faith

[robjer]

Here's a free video converter I've used for a couple years. Matter of fact I just converter 14 .mp4s to .avi less than 30 minutes ago.
Go Figure!
Here's a link: http://www.any-video-converter.com/prod ... ideo_free/