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The default video player is fully functional (obviously) and includes some neat features including the ability to take screenshots of the video and lock the display to avoid accidental exits.
It managed to handle 1080p H.264 MP4 files fine yet anything more and it started to struggle. A 40 Mb/s MKV file stuttered every few seconds and at one point gave up completely. This was a continuing trend – strain the player too much (whether the file is of a higher quality or from too much playing with the extras) and it will just throw an error message saying it cannot play the file.
Playback was much smoother when using a third party play such as Dice; under this player it played the aforementioned 40 Mb/s MKV file just fine.
Youtube playback was smooth no matter what medium I went through. HD/HQ playback was fine in the Youtube app and on the mobile site. Most impressively however was smooth 1080p playback in the stock browser. It is pretty tedious getting it to play 1080p and into fullscreen due to massive lag but the only stutters I noticed past this were purely network/buffer related.
DLNA
Since this was the first time we’ve had a DLNA capable TV on hand we thought we would give DLNA a go with the HTC One X. Music can be streamed over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth (presumably this also includes Apt-X), while pictures and videos are limited to Wi-Fi.
For the most part decent DLNA functionality was either hit or miss. For what it was worth sending pictures across the network to the TV worked fine every time. From there it just gets worse, the TV would recognise that music was being attempted to be played but seven times out of ten the music just would not play.
Video playback did not fare any better – when it did work we were impressed but when it didn’t (which was most of the time) it was annoying. Most recently the favourite error message it likes to throw up is “Sorry, this video cannot be played. (701)” even though it will playback on the TV until you formally acknowledge the error.
On the whole DLNA performance was largely buggy; saying this your own experiences could be different depending upon your own network and DLNA capable devices.
Music Application
From the word go you are presented with links to SoundHound, TuneIn Radio and 7digital. Fortunately for most people these app shortcuts are not baked into the music application (and there is also the option to add more links).
You have the ability to access media services and we found this to work reliably, a lot more so than DLNA, though it’s not quite the same function as the audio is heading the other way.
I’m sure all of you can find your album or song of choice, no matter how bizarre the layout. All that needs to be said is that it is not a chore on the One X. Even if you load thousands of songs the search function browses through artists, albums and individual songs.
Soundhound is integrated into the app but why this is needed when we more than likely already know what the song is is a bit beyond us. HTC also includes a function allowing you to update album art using Gracenote but we found it to crash most, if not all times we used it to update the entire library (some 300 songs). However, it seemed to work fine when updating individual albums/songs.
Audio Quality
We found the HTC One X’s audio quality to be pretty good, we could not notice crosstalk of any kind and both high and mids sounds nice and clear.
As is common with HTC smartphones since last year Beats Audio is present on the One X. I find it to be little more than a equaliser that fills out the low end and smooths vocals slightly. Further adding to the Beats Audio gimmick is that it (and other equaliser presets) can’t be enabled when using the phone’s external speakers.
