Excellent App for viewing drone videos with high bit rates

[Drestin Black]

I'm sure many of you are like me, you like to view your drone videos on a big screen now and again. I can view the videos via the Go app on my iPhone 8 Plus no problemo. I can also view them on my older iPad but they play with a little jerkiness. However, I would very much like to view them on my big screen TV. To that end I've tried many options. WD TV, Roxio, Chromecast, etc etc. I had a 3rd generation AppleTV, didn't work well. I upgraded to the latest AppleTV 4K - says 4K right there, should be able to handle 4K videos right? Not from my drone. Bitrates over 30 mb/s were ALWAYS buffering no matter what app or settings I tried (VLC, etc). This is via a gigabit wired connection, not Wifi, to either my fast Windows PC or a Linksys NAS share.

Last night I found a video playback app available on both iOS (iPhone/iPad) and tvOS (AppleTV). I figured, why not, one more to try for free. Shock! It worked. Not just with 1080p30 and higher but even my 4K30 videos. Smooth without any buffering whatsoever. This is the first and only thing (device or app) that has allowed that. I'm quite excited; I thought I'd share this with my fellow enthusiasts online.

The app is called Infuse. The free version does everything you need. There is a "Pro" version that will allow you do to many other things, but these would be unrelated to drone videos. The one thing it doesn't do is display photos, but I have plenty of apps for that!

Infuse 5 - An elegant video player | Firecore

I'm not related to the product - just a satisfied user.

 

[David_Cambridge]

I have had very good luck transcoding 4K footage to HEVC and playing it on a Roku using PLEX. The Roku to tv is HDMI, and computer to Roku is wireless. 15 mbps HEVC files are very nice looking on a 4K Sony.

The DJI h.264 codec implementation is very demanding on any hardware. This is why all but the newest computers have trouble with it. For editing, I transcode to Prores, which is a great editing codec, and transcode the edited result to HEVC 15 mbpsfor tv play back.

 

[Drestin Black]

Excellent info, thank you.

In this case I’m wanting to browse the raw downloaded videos. I’ve found anything over 25-30 mb/s really stresses all kinds of equipment, despite bandwidth over the connection. I don’t rant to have to transcode hundreds of videos I may not view more than once; Infuse let’s me browse them one after another raw.

I would LOVE to see DJI embrace HEVC in future releases!!!