Google TV Lacks a Good HDR Player App
I own a TV, Sony A95L, built on top of Google TV. Since I have a USB hard drive containing movies and TV series, I wanted to see if I could connect it to the TV and play videos directly from there, rather than from my Macbook Pro connected via HDMI.
Unfortunately, there’s no good HDR player app. I tried a bunch1, and none of them display HDR. They downconvert it to SDR and display that, which is a huge reduction in quality.
Even if there were a good HDR player app, Google TV didn’t support my HFS+ disk. Even with an exFAT disk, the TV abruptly unmounted it twice, the second time when it crashed and rebooted. This can corrupt the hard disk. All the more so because it uses exFAT, which isn’t journaled. That’s another reason to mount it on my laptop, which runs a full operating system (Mac / Windows), not Android.
Instead of an external hard disk, I could use SMB or SFTP to pull files from my Mac, but this shitty technology has never worked smoothly: it doesn’t connect, or says no files are found, requires storing your password insecurely, or you have to keep changing your settings every time the IP address changes.
For all these reasons, I no longer try to use a player app directly on the TV. Instead, I play them from my laptop via HDMI.
NOVA Video Player is the least bad video player app. It’s a good SDR player. It played all the files I tried. It played both SDR and HDR files (by downconverting to SDR), both in UHD. When it comes to video formats, it supported AV1, HEVC and H264. When it comes to audio formats, it supported Opus 7.1, Dolby TrueHD 7.1, DTS Master Audio, e-AC-3 5.1, AC-3 5.1 and AAC 5.1. This is good.
The built-in Media Player app made by Sony wasn’t able to navigate into some folders. It would display “Please wait”. I tried again, and tried another folder, and it didn’t work. I tried a third folder, and it did navigate into it, but didn’t show the video file in it. I tried to navigate into a sub-folder and it wouldn’t. Considering all this, I disabled the Media Player app in settings.
File Manager is primarily a file manager, but it has a built-in video player. So I evaluated it. It was bad, as expected: it didn’t let me turn off subtitles. If the video has multiple audio tracks, I can’t choose one. This matters because for some videos, English is not the default; it might be Spanish or Russian. When I seek, the audio would start playing while the video took a couple of seconds to start. It seeks too much, so if you missed a few seconds, it’s hard to go back. There are onscreen -10s and +10s buttons, but you can’t press and hold them to seek continuously. The UI has bugs: If you’re pressing the right button to reach an on-screen button and you press it one too many times, you should be able to press left once to move focus back to the button. This doesn’t work, and neither in the up / down direction. The UI is laid out in three layers vertically. When I’m in the bottom layer and I press Up, focus sometimes moves to the middle layer (as it should) but sometimes to the top one. It did play all the files I threw at it, as I explained in the section on NOVA player. Considering all this, I would use File Manager as a file manager, not a video player.
MX Player showed the contents of my external hard drive the first time. While I was playing, the USB drive suddenly unmounted. I don’t know if it’s this app’s fault. After I replugged the drive, MX Player still showed its contents as empty. Force stopping MX Player fixed that problem. A second problem is that it showed folders as containing 0 videos when they do contain videos in subfolders. When trying to play a HDR video, it showed “Buffering” for 20 seconds and then gave an error “This audio format (TRUEHD) is not supported.” Audio shouldn’t be a reason for playback to fail — it can always be decoded in software. This video plays fine in another app. When I tried another video, it said “Player is busy. please try again later.” with the inconsistent capitalisation. Browsing the folder structure is painful because each time I navigate to a folder, it lags before displaying the contents, sometimes for multiple seconds. On another occasion I got a black screen and no audio, but the play timer kept increasing. On yet another occasion, the same video played, but when I paused it and unpaused it, it got stuck. Pressing the up button sometimes increases the volume, and sometimes moves focus. There’s no need to misuse up / down as volume control since the remote control has dedicated volume buttons. When I selected an SDR video, it buffered for 20 seconds, which I haven’t seen in 20 years! Considering all this, I uninstalled MX Player.
Just Player doesn’t even have a proper folder browser. It shows all subfolders, hundreds of them, in a giant list, so it’s hard to find what I want. There’s a reason we organise folders inside parent folders. I uninstalled Just Player.
VLC sucks. It has poor attention to detail on all platforms, but it’s extra annoying on the TV. I uninstalled VLC.