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When I drive my kids they often watch cartoons on my android phone with the cartoon's audio coming out of the car speakers, connected to the car's audio system via bluetooth. Unfortunately, there is a very visible 1-2 seconds delay between the video (as observed on the phone's screen) and the audio. There is no such delay when listening to the audio directly from the phone's speaker. There is no noticeable delay when the phone is connected to the same car for the purpose of phone conversations. However, the combination youtube video on the phone's screen + audio from the car's speakers has this annoying 1-2 seconds delay.

Thus the question: what may be causing this and how do I reconfigure whatever needs to be configured in order to fix this?

In case if the specifics matter, the phone is Samsung Galaxy S5, the car is 2013 Honda Odyssey with built-in audio system.

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  • Have you tried re-pairing the phone to the Odyssey?
    – Pᴀᴜʟsᴛᴇʀ2 ♦
    Feb 7, 2017 at 21:08
  • I'll remind whoever VTC'd and downvoted, that car accessory questions are on topic for this site. The stereo in the vehicle is an accessory.
    – Pᴀᴜʟsᴛᴇʀ2 ♦
    Feb 7, 2017 at 22:27
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    Use headphone jack and aux in put on stereo, see if problem persists.
    – cory
    Feb 9, 2017 at 18:53
  • None of these answers are helpful. I’ve had this issue with numerous cars. It’s not the phone if video syncs just fine with Bluetooth headsets and some after market car stereos. It seems to just be an individual stereo engineering difference. But what is it? What are some car stereos missing that others and Bluetooth headsets have?
    – Joe Mielcarek
    Nov 9, 2018 at 15:19

4 Answers 4

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Not wanting to necro a dead thread, but this is a known issue with Honda Bluetooth audio.

There is a bug in the bluetooth handshake that results in data-only transmission. Proof.

This means then that the phone is encoding audio into data, and then the car is decoding that data back into audio. As a result, you get lag on the encode, and lag on the decode. Honda is aware of the issue, but as of 2018 has yet to release a firmware upgrade for cars with this issue. I do not know if 2018 Hondas still exhibit this bug.

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As far as I know this is just how Bluetooth works. Throughout all my years there has always been a delay in audio when used in combination with Bluetooth.

There are some software that delay the video by a few seconds so it matches up with the audio.

So I guess your fix would be to find a video player where you can manually sync the video and audio.

Maybe VLC on Android can do it: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.videolan.vlc

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  • I have a 2007 Odyssey, and I'm a software developer with 5 years of experience in Bluetooth. A 1 to 2 second delay is not normal. You should expect something in the 100 to 200 millisecond range for Bluetooth. Devices that support A2DP 1.3, however, can compensate for this buffering delay. Both the audio source and sink have to support A2DP 1.3 for it to make a difference.
    – Samuel
    Mar 19, 2018 at 17:37
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This is a software / hardware limit problem you could try a better streaming app on your phone if your stereo support others, the problem is streaming audio via Bluetooth is quite a lot of work,

Phone process

Receive audio steam -> convert to a codec for the player -> send over blue tooth

stereo process

receive blue tooth -> convert codec to audio stream -> play audio

so for all sound these 6 steps have to occur and converting audio is a relatively slow process, and made worse by cheap / free codecs.

and more likly to be on your phones end as you say it seems to be bad with you tube so it could be the processing of the video download and then decoding the video codec to display and the processing of the audio for Bluetooth could be that the phone CPU can't cope with that much simultaneously

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  • My iPhone's Music app works just fine with any other Bluetooth speaker, there's no noticeable delay. Also, Bluetooth uses a codec (SBC) that is optimized for minimal CPU usage, not quality. Also see my comment to Cucumber's answer.
    – Samuel
    Mar 19, 2018 at 17:42
  • Oh your knowing the name of a codec does not change the validity of my answer, the OP said there was more lag when using youtube which means's there is a CPU load issue it does not matter how much it's optimized an ARM CPU is not really built for multitasking high load processes, and just because it's lower quality than MP3 or some other codec does not mean it's not a relatively slow process when compared with input handling., one last thing is not all bluetooth audio uses SBC it is one of a few soundguys.com/understanding-bluetooth-codecs-15352
    – Barkermn01
    Mar 19, 2018 at 18:10
  • Any smart phone made, whether Apple or Android, probably since 2010/2011 has more than enough CPU power to handle this use case. In Bluetooth there are 2 profiles for audio transfer, HFP and A2DP. HFP is for phone calls. It is designed for low latency, with a quality tradeoff. A2DP is designed for high quality, with a latency tradeoff. The OP did not make note of the delay with a stand alone music app. A music app, and YouTube, both use A2DP, high latency. A phone call uses HFP, low latency.
    – Samuel
    Mar 23, 2018 at 15:45
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    I own an Odyssey. I've used my phone with a lot of other Bluetooth devices. The delay is not because of my phone. The Honda has a superfluously oversized jitter buffer. Perhaps they did this to workaround a hardware issue, e.g. maybe a poor antenna design. Or perhaps the Odyssey's CPU is overloaded and this was the easiest way to overcome audio dropouts. Either way, this is an Odyssey issue. Read a few forums, a lot of people have reported this issue, here's an example: driveaccord.net/forums/138-audio-electronics-lighting/….
    – Samuel
    Mar 23, 2018 at 15:46
  • The OP specifically states Honda Odyssey. Your points aren't wrong, just highly unlikely to be the cause. My point was not to diminish the value of your answer, but instead point blame to the party who's most likely at fault, which in this case is Honda. This is a discussion, not sure why foul language is needed.
    – Samuel
    Mar 26, 2018 at 16:34
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This is a known issue with Hondas. I have much better resource Bluetooth sync in non honda automobiles. The phone isn't the issue it's the honda.

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  • While I have no reason to doubt you, do you have an references to show what you're talking about?
    – Pᴀᴜʟsᴛᴇʀ2 ♦
    Sep 3, 2018 at 15:13

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