Harry's GPS Suite Forum

Hi, is there any info about HW acceleration in overlay process on android devices?

Yesterday i´ve tried to overlay test video in 1080p (aprox 13,3min) and it takes almost 4 hours to do it! Which is really terrible, especially when android devices have sufficient power to do it. In my case is SGS4 (i9505), 4-core 1.9GHz and 2GB RAM...

I understand that it is easier to make an application for iOS, because it has unified HW, but it would also improve support for android devices, at least key devices (Samsung Galaxy series, Nexus series, etc.).

I do not see it is feasible to implement individual device support for hw acceleration. There are around 4000 different device types compatible with LT currently. Even supporting a few top sellers makes a small share overall. Further more the share would vanish within a short time. Just to understand the issue: even large development companies have stopped testing apps for a large share of devices. Instead apps are tested against Android samples and the rest is done when feedback is coming in. Even for device manufacturers it is hard to maintain individual support for devices - which is one of the reasons many devices do not get Android version updates...

The only solution will be switching to an Android video service in the future. In case the manufacturers do a good job, there will be a chance for hw acceleration.

Harry

Are there any Android devices that have hardware acceleration?

No, not yet.

Harry wrote:No, not yet.

How is the software encoding on android implemented? Android API or Bionic calls, or are you embedding x264/ffmpeg/etc? (IE, if x264/ffmpeg adds hardware acceleration for any arm platforms, is it possible laptimer will inherit it in a future version?)

Currently, LapTimer uses ffmpeg. I have made my plans for the next release now (19.1) and will add native Android support to it. Native support for video decoding / encoding is available since Android 4.4 (which will be the minimum requirement in case you want to benefit from hardware accelerated encoding).

- Harry

I was hoping the Samsung S series would be faster for the overlay...wanted to share data while at the track and not have to wait. I typically just push it to my ipad now as it is much faster, but I still have to do that at home or bring a laptop with me to pull the video from the S5 and then push it over to the ipad.

I wish HLT could share video easier between devices like it does with the data.

I have planned to add hardware accelerated overlaying for Android for LapTimer 19.1.

Harry