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2 years of poor performance from this tv, rubbish updates and again services we pay for are useless on this one device
Lipsync has got even worse with amazon.
Watching american gods and its a good 0.5 seconds out. All i want is a working tv sony is it really this hard. Already had one replacement. In a real update why not allow or give the ability to delay sound as its one of your biggest issues
Amazon Video on Sony Android TV is indeed a disaster. I had to restart the app 5 times yesterday before video started to play. It was always like that:
- start Amazon
- start movie
> only sound, black screen
- restart movie
> Amazon hang-up
Happened 5 times. Then finally, I also got video.
A/V synchonization remains an issue. So you either end up with async audio or stuttering. This is especially true for 4K and Dolby passthrough.
I assume this to be a mixture of bad app and flaky MediaTek drivers.
The experience has been aweful for years already. No clue why nobody seems to be interested in fixing those issues.
Honestly for once I wouldn't blame the weak Mediatek SoC. I tested the Amazon Video app in my Xperia X Compact (which is totally smooth with everything else) and even there it stuttered (with a fiber connection, so it isn't the network). Also Netflix and Plex on TV are super smooth. TIM Vision (an Italian video streaming), which is a bit heavy as well, doesn't have any of the Amazon Video app issues. And the PS4 version of the Amazon Video app instead plays just fine, going to 1080p immediately.
I am not sure. I think it also depends on how A/V are muxed (offset a.s.o.). I think that Amazon could do better for sure as others are also working much better. But there are also MediaTek related issues. Some video files for example stutter with every player app when decoding/rendering via MediaCodec Surface where pretty much everything is done by the SoC in HW.
The app is a total disater. Stutters, hangs, lip sync issues the whole bloody lot.
@Kuschelmonschter Obviously it is also a matter of resources. When an app is bad, the "solution" given by many developers has often been: buy better hardware!!
Anyway, since now I am going to have lot o free time (the beauty of teaching ) I did investigate the issue a bit more. These are some of my findings:
MEMORY FOOTPRINT:
The Amazon Video app is much heavier that any other video player I tested:
BRAVIA_ATV2:/ $ dumpsys -t 20 meminfo com.amazon.aiv.eu Applications Memory Usage (in Kilobytes): Uptime: 60528016 Realtime: 80314828 ** MEMINFO in pid 17088 [com.amazon.aiv.eu] ** Pss Private Private SwapPss Heap Heap Heap Total Dirty Clean Dirty Size Alloc Free ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ Native Heap 261339 261324 12 0 315264 304885 10378 Dalvik Heap 1345 1336 0 0 5654 3393 2261 [...] TOTAL 305976 282212 19764 5 320918 308278 12639
This is instead what I get with the Plex app 9which is about the same for YouTube and TIM Vision):
BRAVIA_ATV2:/ $ dumpsys -t 20 meminfo com.plexapp.android Applications Memory Usage (in Kilobytes): Uptime: 59883632 Realtime: 79670444 ** MEMINFO in pid 13297 [com.plexapp.android] ** Pss Private Private SwapPss Heap Heap Heap Total Dirty Clean Dirty Size Alloc Free ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ Native Heap 14791 14684 44 0 33280 23176 10103 Dalvik Heap 100483 100476 0 0 99696 83312 16384 Dalvik Other 1692 1692 0 8 [...] TOTAL 134383 121124 8896 1153 132976 106488 26487
305MB in Amazon vs 134MB in Plex. More than twice the RAM usage.
CPU USAGE:
Then I checked with "top" the CPU usage (the stock top. Unfortunately in 7.0 the one from busybox, which is better readable, only shows the processes we own) and it is indeed a bit of a disaster. This is from a clean situation (after clearing the history) after starting playing a movie:
User 9%, System 8%, IOW 0%, IRQ 0% User 191 + Nice 5 + Sys 178 + Idle 1668 + IOW 5 + IRQ 0 + SIRQ 3 = 2050 PID USER PR NI CPU% S #THR VSS RSS PCY Name 30649 u0_a70 20 0 8% S 63 1522132K 334876K ta com.amazon.aiv.eu 1258 system 12 -8 1% D 26 162564K 7044K unk /system/bin/surfaceflinger
Then I wanted to make things a bit heavier so I pushed the Discover button:
User 22%, System 35%, IOW 19%, IRQ 0%User 461 + Nice 13 + Sys 745 + Idle 472 + IOW 409 + IRQ 0 + SIRQ 2 = 2102 PID USER PR NI CPU% S #THR VSS RSS PCY Name 30649 u0_a70 20 0 11% S 63 1522028K 331568K ta com.amazon.aiv.eu 455 root 20 0 9% S 1 0K 0K fg kswapd0
And you see how the hateful kswapd0, which is a process for the virtual memory management in Linux, kicked as well taking up to 1/10 of the CPU. It's needless to say that after pushing the Discover button the Amazon app immediately started stuttering, with the audio cracking and all kind of mess it usually does. The total CPU usage shown is slightlly less than 100%, but high enough to slow down the system to an unacceptable level in an interactive system.
Then if you want to make things really heavy, just start many apps from the the Discover button (so that they stay in background until they get killed by Android for lack of RAM when starting a new app), and lastly Amazon Video. Basically I had the tv sitting down. But I am afraid I've also hit a bug, because the UI became unresponsive for a minute or more (which may actually be related to the volume bar issue discussed in another thread). I know from logcats in similar situations that in this kind of case Android just force closes all background apps thus freeing all possible resources, starting with the RAM and CPU.
So yes, as I always say it is also a Sony's fault for having installed only 2GB of RAM, (and a weak SoC). But with plenty of RAM I believe the SoC would be a non issue, since our tvs have plenty of HW to play smoothly even the highly demanding HEVC/x265 videos.
Oh, last info in case you're not aware of it, our Android TV makes use of the ZRAM. In both 6.0.1 and 7.0. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to help much. Linux can't manage to make use of even half of it :
Total RAM: 1,613,712K (status normal) Free RAM: 492,410K ( 83,590K cached pss + 99,368K cached kernel + 309,452K free) Used RAM: 1,337,611K (1,031,479K used pss + 306,132K kernel) Lost RAM: -166,082K ZRAM: 201,296K physical used for 514,072K in swap (1,196,348K total swap)
Then I'd love to know what the heck is that "Lost RAM". Hopefully they aren't 166MB thrown in the garbage due to memory leaks or else.
Nice write up, illustrates the problem is at both ends, not withstanding amazon didnt sell me the tv lol.
Can anyone reccomend another android tv, basically i want what i have but one that works....
since our tvs have plenty of HW to play smoothly even the highly demanding HEVC/x265 videos.
That's all done by a dedicated video decoder ASIC inside the SoC. Disable HW acceleration in Kodi and you will see how much you can decode via the SoC's CPU .
Had a call from Sony today regards this, very helpfull listened to the issues which are know and have opened a case to try and resolve, possible a replacement for a newer version. (unsure weather this will help) anyway informed all i want is a tv like i have but one that works and doesnt take 30-60 seconds to change a tv channel from standby
will keep this thread up to date with progress,
thanks to quinnicus for escalating this
Hi @Prior20
I cannot take any credit im afriad One of the forum moderators escalated this on your behalf. For the last couple of weeks ive been rather
Cheers