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Prior20

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

Kuschelmonschter

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.

Jecht_Sin

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.

Kuschelmonschter

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.

Risc0n

The app is a total disater. Stutters, hangs, lip sync issues the whole bloody lot.

Jecht_Sin

@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.

Prior20

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....

Kuschelmonschter

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 .

Prior20

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

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