Video aspect ratio problem since upgrading to android 4.3

[David Reculver]

My Nexus 7 (no more than four months old) upgraded it's OS automatically to Android 4.3 a few weeks ago. Since then, the aspect ratio of personal videos saved to the device is wrong when they are played. No changes I can make to settings appear to affect this. I have experienced the problem with the default player that allowed me to view videos, and MX Player Pro that I purchased through Google Play. Typically, the problem appears as either a squashing of the vertical aspect, or occasionally, a slight stretching of the vertical aspect. Videos are all MP4s. I have not saved to the device in any other format. All of these videos displayed properly prior to the OS upgrade.

I contacted Google about this and was routed through to Google Play. The "solution" they proposed was almost literally a dog's breakfast. They suggested that I should re-set the device to factory settings (effectively trashing my current set-up that had been working fine until the OS upgrade), and then see "if" that fixes the problem. If it does, the other part of their dog's breakfast solution is to disable OS upgrades to the device so that the problem doesn't recur. It is hard for me to express without expletives what I thought of this as a technical response. In essence they seemed to be saying "We've got your money.....now sort it out yourself by going back to scratch and re-installing everything." The question is, why has this happened? I've done some web searches, and to be fair (or as fair as I'm inclined to be after what I felt was a facile response from Google Play), there do not appear to be any other of reports about this happening. I also did a search in this forum before positing to it, again without finding a report of the problem. Clearly it is peculiar to my device.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I can troubleshoot this?

Many thanks.

 

[Scott Kenyon]

A factory reset is usually a go-to troubleshooting technique. I recommend this countless times a day on this forum. Without sending it in or exchanging the device, it's a solution to many problems. If you have a software problem, factory resets will generally take care of most of them. If it doesn't, you have a larger problem that will need diagnosis. Without taking that step, we'll never know to go further. I'll never go against what Google recommends for their products. They know better than I do. I'd do what they asked and see what comes from it.

 

[David Reculver]

Scott,

Many thanks for your advice, and for the reassurance. I will do as you suggest.

Much appreciated.

Best wishes,

D.

 

[David Reculver]

Scott,

A brief footnote to this issue. I carried out the factory reset after backing up my data, and it appears to have resolved the problem, as you predicted. You were absolutely right. What this has also highlighted is that the Android OS has no effective system restore feature that would allow users to roll back after an update has caused a problem. As it is, there is a half-hearted restore in Google Play that downloaded my apps again, but for the rest of it, I was back to square one. I spent weeks configuring and tweaking the device to look and perform just as I wanted it to. Now, because of an update to the OS, I have to do all of that again. It may be that Apple is no better in this respect (I have no means of telling as I am not an iPad or iPhone user). Whatever the case, in some respects this is almost like using Windows 3.1 again, and I'm not impressed by it.

As a footnote to this footnote, I see that my device has now downloaded a system update that wants to upgrade the OS to Jelly Bean. This is where I came in and all of my video problems started. If there were a proper system restore feature, I might be tempted to give the upgrade another try, but as things stand, I don't think I'll bother.

Many thanks again for your help.

D.

 

[Scott Kenyon]

Any time, David. I'm happy your problem is solved. I recommend you install Helium and use that as a back up tool. It works great and saves you a lot of work.

Sent from my HTC One using Mobile Nations mobile app

 

[YAYTech]

I've noted that this thread should be moved to the Nexus 7 2012 section.

I agree that they need to continue to work on system restore, transfer, backup, etc. To be fair, though, Android has come a LONG way in the last 4-5 years I've been using it, and they've been taking big strides toward some of these types of things. Still, system restore is a tricky thing, as it can easily end up backing up the very thing that caused an issue to begin with.