The Digital Jedi's Words

I know it’s been a while since I have posted something but today I felt the need to post a finding.  As the iPhone 4 ships I can’t help but wonder why all the hype?  Most Android devices do the same plus more.  With Android now having Flash 10.1 and this player, you have all the tools needed to view 99% of web content unlike Apple iPhone 4.  One of Android’s major shortcomings is its lack of compatibility with many audio and video filetypes. Fortunately, double twist stepped in to fix the audio problem, but what about video playback? That’s where RockPlayerBase comes in!

Compatible with a plethora of video formats, including MKV, AVI and DivX, RockPlayerBase combines great compatibility with a simple interface. Controls are overlaid on the screen, so you can still see the video track whilst using the controls.

When testing on the Motorola DROID, I found playback quality to be predominantly good. I tested a DVD rip encoded in AVI which played back without any problems, although audio

output was sometimes a little pitchy and inconsistent.

I also tested a 720p MKV file, albeit with less successful results. Whether it’s a hardware or software issue is debatable, but video

playback wasn’t even remotely smooth, and I was lucky if I got even a second of audio playback before having it cut off too.

FeelAndroid tested the player with various formats, and found some interesting results… continue reading…

Here is a proper Step by Step tutorial for anyone wanting to install this on their Droid, and hopefully this will help answer most peoples questions. I had done this to my DROID and love it even more now than I did yesterday.

SholesMod Updater will backup all of your existing data, but if you would rather be safe than sorry do a backup of your stuff before continuing.

If you have WiFi, go ahead and enable it now as it will make the download process go by much faster.

Here we go:

1. Go to Android Marketplace
2. Search for SholesMod Updater, donate your $5 and download the app (or download from Sholes)
3. Open SholesMod Updater
4. “Your phone is not rooted”. Select Root my Phone (update.zip will download to your SD card)
5. When you get the “Reboot into recovery mode message”, press the home button and power off the phone
5. Reboot into recovery mode by holding the X key on the keyboard while powering on.
6. When the MOTO logo changes to recovery (white triangle with yellow exclamation point and phone picture ) press and hold the volume up button and then press the camera button
7. Once in the menu select Apply sdcard:update.zip with D-pad and select with center button
8. Once it’s done applying update.zip select reboot with D-pad and select with center button

Congratulations! Your Droid is now rooted, but we’re not done just yet. If all went well, you should see a new icon in your app drawer called Superuser Permissions.
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With all the hype surrounding what Apple is doing with the new A4 CPU, no one has heard of a company called Nvidia which produces excellent chips.  Anyone heard of the snapdragon processor which is in the Nexus One, well they are the ones behind the architecture, which in my opinion is pretty damn sweet.

Tegra 2 is official and put simply, it looks awesome. NVIDIA estimates that it is four times faster than the original Tegra chip while staying in the same power and thermal envelope. And looking at the diagram, we can understand why: the chip combines 8 processors: two Arm Cortex A9, one ARM 7, an image processor, an HD video decode processor, an HD video encode processor, and audio processor and a graphics processor (GPU), phew! Thanks to all this power, NVIDIA says that it succeeds in playing local 1080p video and stream HD video (flash) where competitors like Qualcomm and Intel fail. And it does it while using less power. NVIDIA’s battery life estimate is 140+hrs for music playback, 12hrs for 1080p video playback and 6 hours of continuous HD web streaming. According to these numbers, Tegra 2 consumes about 7x less than Snapdragon. The chips will come in different packages to address markets like smartphones, multimedia players, automotive entertainment, but also smartbooks. Developer boards are already available.

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