According to DJI's marketing material for the CrystalSky, we should be able to play back H.265 content: https://www.dji.com/crystalsky/info. I have the 7.85" variant and I love the screen, but being able to playback footage from the drone was a major selling point for me.

H.265 content cannot be played on my CrystalSky. On the Mavic Air, I was always able to playback the drone captured footage by using the MicroSD slots on the CS. This was great for reviewing the full res footage captured by the drone do determine whether I should retake my shot. I cannot do this with the Mavic 2 Pro (unless I encode using H.264 which is not an option as I need the D-Log color profile).

When I insert a MicroSD with the H.265 encoded media files from the drone it recognizes that the files are there. In the gallery app they show up, but with garbled thumbnails (jpg photos and h.264 videos show proper thumbnails). When I try to open the h.265 mp4 or mov files, the player loads, the screen goes black and the app stalls. I can close the player, but ultimately, I cannot play back the file.

I have tried the following:
1. Reset my CS
2. Made sure my CS is on latest firmware
3. Installed third-party media players that support h.265 decoding: VLC, MXPlayer

I am able to play the files via MXPlayer, but the image is garbled (just like the thumbnails). By garbled, I mean a completely unusable image - you can kind of make out some shapes - but they are scrambled with green lines.

The fact that it is decoding the stream in MXPlayer leads me to believe that the driver for the GPU on our CS is bad and needs an update.

Is anyone able to open h.265 videos shot by the Mavic 2 Pro on their CrystalSky?

DJI, I have reported this problem before, but nothing has been to to address this. I have called your support line and after explaining the problem I was put on hold. I abandoned the call after waiting for 45 minutes and no-one came back to the call. I have mentioned this problem here as well: https://forum.dji.com/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=169856

HELP!

Thanks,
Wouter

Tried it. VLC wont work even if you copy the files from memory card to local storage. The harware is not up to it I guess.

Sweflyer Posted at 12-2 07:55
Tried it. VLC wont work even if you copy the files from memory card to local storage. The harware is not up to it I guess.

And that's where I take issue. The cpu and gpu combo on the CrystalSky is specced to support h.265 4k 30fps playback. The CrystalSky, through some digging on my own that you can read about here has the Rockchip RK3288 CPU/GPU package.  Rockchip's wiki page for this package lists support fo HEVC H.265 decoding at 4k@60fps on the RK3288.  All of that begs the question: why can't the CrystalSky decode H.265 video at 30fps when the hardware inside is designed to be able to? I think it's software/driver issue that DJI has to fix.

wreyniers Posted at 12-3 13:20
And that's where I take issue. The cpu and gpu combo on the CrystalSky is specced to support h.265 4k 30fps playback. The CrystalSky, through some digging on my own that you can read about here has the Rockchip RK3288 CPU/GPU package.  Rockchip's wiki page for this package lists support fo HEVC H.265 decoding at 4k@60fps on the RK3288.  All of that begs the question: why can't the CrystalSky decode H.265 video at 30fps when the hardware inside is designed to be able to? I think it's software/driver issue that DJI has to fix.

It´s actually spec:ed for H.265 4k 60fps playback.Thinking about rooting it and try some different drivers and codecs.

#2
What are you trying to play it on, I would have thought the cache should play even if you selected 1080p.
H.265 which you have to use for dLOG is very demanding and even quite decent spec computers will struggle.
The 10 bit and 100 bitrate at 4K are part of the issue.
You can record at 2.7K or 1080p via Atompark software

Jon Walter Posted at 12-10 15:24
#2
What are you trying to play it on, I would have thought the cache should play even if you selected 1080p.
H.265 which you have to use for dLOG is very demanding and even quite decent spec computers will struggle.

I'm trying to play the video on the CrystalSky using different media players, including the one that came with it stock. I'm not talking about cache footage, that plays back without issues. I'm talking about the footage captured on the SD card in the drone. Doing this works if the video is H.264, but doesn't work if it's encoded with H.265.

I understand that decoding H.265 video on old hardware is difficult as it typically requires GPU acceleration to play back smoothly. That's where my gripe comes in, the CPU/GPU package on the CrystalSky is advertised to be able to play back H.265 4k @ 60fps. It doesn't specify 10-bit, which might be what pushes it beyond its capabilities,  but I haven't heard a peep from DJI on this matter either way. I purchased the CrystalSky in part to be able to review footage from the SD card post-flight - this is a feature that works perfectly for H.264 footage. But as you probably already know, to get the best picture out of the drone, you have to shoot H.265 in D-log mode.

Also, as I mentioned, you can play back the files in  MXplayer - and the frame rate is solid. However, the picture is garbled. The fact that it can play back the file seems to imply the CPU/GPU/storage hardware has enough resource to pull the file from the SD card fast enough and do a decoding (albeit with a garbled image) pass without stressing the hardware too much.

Again, I am pretty convinced this is a software/driver issue that can be resolved with a firmware update.

At the very least, we need DJI to give us a response as to whether this is something they plan to resolve.

Crickets... come on DJI. This is quickly falling into the false advertising category.

Probably never gunna happen either. Unless the next firmware upgrade comes with a new processor and memory upgrade. Really started to show its age now .. and total lack of support from DJI to boot.

Sky Donkey Posted at 12-26 16:23
Probably never gunna happen either. Unless the next firmware upgrade comes with a new processor and memory upgrade. Really started to show its age now .. and total lack of support from DJI to boot.

The CPU/GPU package on the CrystalSky has hardware decoding support for h.265 4k at 60fps. The hardware should not the problem. Unless DJI is making claims about its product that aren't factual.

Sky Donkey Posted at 12-26 16:23
Probably never gunna happen either. Unless the next firmware upgrade comes with a new processor and memory upgrade. Really started to show its age now .. and total lack of support from DJI to boot.

The CPU/GPU package on the CrystalSky has hardware decoding support for h.265 4k at 60fps. The hardware should not the problem. Unless DJI is making claims about its product that aren't factual.

wreyniers Posted at 12-26 17:01
The CPU/GPU package on the CrystalSky has hardware decoding support for h.265 4k at 60fps. The hardware should not the problem. Unless DJI is making claims about its product that aren't factual.

To be honest It wouldn't be complete surprise if they were.     The term "coming soon" springs to mind also... I guess 4 months isn't quite soon enough for Waypoints 2.0

Apparently ,as I discovered today by accident, if you have HDMI connected to a monitor , the screen remains black when playing h.265 10bit 4K files, but the monitor shows the video file normally! Directly from the SD card with the default playback software through the file explorer. So there is enough processing power but something wrong with drivers\software!

fanse96f61c1 Posted at 1-1 07:08
Apparently ,as I discovered today by accident, if you have HDMI connected to a monitor , the screen remains black when playing h.265 10bit 4K files, but the monitor shows the video file normally! Directly from the SD card with the default playback software through the file explorer. So there is enough processing power but something wrong with drivers\software!

This is a great find! Thank you for confirming my suspicion that the hardware is sufficient and that there's something in the software or driver that's keeping things from playing back on the CS.

DJI, now it's up to you. We've done the homework, now you must apply the fix.

Thanks fanse96f61c1!

I shoot a lot of videos with my DJI Mavic 2 Pro drone. On my PC, I use the included DJI Go 4 app to offload the media, copy it to my local storage and then transcode it to h.264 mp4 files using Handbrake. I export the mp4 files to my phone using the included DJI Go 4 app as well. Everything works fine, but since this is an APK importer preview device, it doesn't have any software to play back H.265 encoded video.