General Discussion - Android Video Converter-Stream Amazon WMV movies to Galaxy tutubebe99 - Tue Jul 24, 2012 12:50 am Post subject: Android Video Converter-Stream Amazon WMV movies to Galaxy
Android Video Converter-Stream Amazon WMV movies to Galaxy Tab 2
"I can't play (.wmv) video fills on my Galaxy Tab 2 10.1. All my videos transferred fine but when I try to play some movies (in .wmv format) an error message appears saying 'Sorry, this video cannot be played'. Why this happen? I thought .wmv is a supported format, isn't it?"
Why should my Galaxy Tab not play .wmv videos? This is a frequently asked question in galaxy tab forums. It's a puzzle to many new GT users, because WMV is mentioned as a supported format if you check Galaxy Tab specifications-
Galaxy Tab supported format: 3gp, mp4, avi, wmv, flv, mkv
In fact Galaxy Tab plays most .wmv movies, but not all of them. Some people say that the error message is caused by high resolution, but per my test Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 handles 1920x1080 HD .wmv files just fine. The real matter is codec. WMV is just a container format in which media contents could be compressed using wmv1, wmv2, wmv3 codecs. However only the wmv3(vc1) is a supported codec to Galaxy Tab-
Galaxy Tab supported codec: MPEG4, H.263, Sorenson H.263, H.264, VC-1, DivX/Xvid
If your WMV file is encoded with earlier WMV2/WMV1 codec instead of VC-1, the WMV is not playable by Galaxy Tab. To play such kind of WMV movie on Galaxy Tab, you need to transcode wmv1/wmv2 to vc-1 (or h.264/divx/mpeg4) before transferring files to the slab.
Related Tool:
* MediaInfo (a free tool for you to check file information including codec)
* Android Video Converter (an format converter for Android devices including Samsung Galaxy Tab
Update: I also noticed that Galaxy Tab gives the same error message when playing purchased movies (.wmv and .m4v). After doing some research I found that this is because movies purchased from online stores are restricted by DRM, a kind of copy-protection method that limits the use of WMV videos on licensed devices to protect distributed movies from illegal use. Unfortunately Samsung Galaxy Tab has not been granted to play DRM-protected media. This means even if you have portable versions for movie purchases (Amazon Instant video, Blu-ray/DVD digital copy), they can not be played by Galaxy Tab.
Good news is that there're DRM-removal tools - Pavtube ChewTune, that let you hack DRM and turn protected wmv video into fair use media.