Develop Reference

Android MediaPlayer synchronized start

I'm trying to use Android's MediaPlayer to play a backing audio track to a music game which should stay in sync with other events.
However, I'm finding that on different devices the backing track seems out of sync.
After some frustration, I'm coming to the conclusion that the time it takes to start playing the audio is indeterminate.
Is there a way around this? Or some kind of callback from the MediaPlayer that represents "starting to play NOW"?
AFAICT I can't use the SoundPool for this backing track as the audio file is too long.

Small pause between looping MediaPlayer

I'm trying to loop a ~30 seconds audio track multiple times. I'm using a MediaPlayer to play the sounds, here is the code where its created:
mAnimalMediaPlayer = MediaPlayer.create(mContext, fish.getSound());
I then call:
mAnimalMediaPlayer.setLooping(true);
mAnimalMediaPlayer.start();
when a play button is clicked. When the track loops, there is a small but noticeable pause between the track ending and the new loop beginning. I am positive that the audio file im using does not contain any actual pause.
Here is an android bug report which has been up for some time: https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=18756
I've tried a few workarounds (such as using .ogg files instead of .mp3) but the problem persists.
I'm looking for any possible workaround that will allow me to seamlessly loop the playback multiple times.

There is a very noticeable pause. However, I have just discovered through experimentation on an emulator running level 25 that if one prepares two identical players and alternately starts them one after the other when the other has finished then the gap becomes much more difficult to hear.

Playing two MediaPlayer objects in sync [Android]

I have two media files located locally - mp4 video and m4a audio, which have to be played in sync. I use MediaPlayer objects for this purpose, all start/pause methods are called simultaneously.
Sometimes I see the difference between audio and video right after players start, sometimes after tapping on pause/resume.
I added logs, and see that after pausing media players, their position differs (e.g. MediaPlayer with audio file: 1820ms, MediaPlayer with video file: 1760ms).
One more interesting thing is that seekTo operation with audio file works good, while with video it's really unpredictable.
Please suggest what is the reason of such a behavior and which solutions are available in order to fix that?

I think that this effect with the video timing depends on how the " key frames", which contain a full frame of information have been encoded. It's only possible to locate to one of these keyframes.
Video editing software gets over this by rolling the deltas from intervening i-frames to the exact seek position.

android media player delay

I am making a game for android which needs to play a small beep whenever a user touches a certain object.
To do this I have this simple code to create the media player. beep is a small .ogg file of ~1.5 sec length.
MediaPlayer mp = MediaPlayer.create(getContext(), R.raw.beep);
mp.setVolume(0.5f, 0.5f);
and use it like this
mp.start();
The problem I am having is that my game uses the android canvas, and the thread which draws to the canvas also calls mp.start(). I have discovered that playing the sound is taking quite a lot of time, and it is very varied in how long it takes. Sometimes 1ms, sometimes 15ms. This appears to be causing my game to noticeably lag a little bit, as the android canvas is pretty slow anyway.
I've had a look at the logs and I don't appear to having garbage collection causing the delay. I'm wondering if anyone can give me some advice to reduce this delay
EDIT - I've just discovered that MediaPlayer is designed for longer sound files, and SoundPool is better for shorter audio files. However, I load the file into the mediaPlayer only once, so I don't see how it should make any difference. I will test it out though

sorry for my english
Use SoundPool instead of MediaPlayer cause MediaPlayer need releasing memory after each call or call method mp.release() after each call of player
SoundPool tutorial here

seekTo in VideoView

I'm having problems with seeking video.
My application should resume video from place where it was stopped last time. So I do this:
videoView.seekTo(bookmark);
videoView.start(); However when it plays I hear sounds form beginning of video for about 1-2 sec. And only after that video seeks to the right position. This behavior is reproducible on HTC Nexus One, HTC G1, HTC evo. But on Samsung galaxy tab all plays normally. Anybody had similar problems? Is this bug HTC-specific? Thanks in advance.

It is definitely not specific to your phone. I am having the same issue on an HTC Incredible. The seekTo works but there is an audio glitch from the beginning of the clip. Based on the results trying to implement the custom VideoView I guess I won't go to the trouble. I am now going to see if I can mute the very beginning of the clip. I'll report back here if I succeed.
Well, I have given up on this. The only way I have found to mute the beginning of the clip is to mute the phone entirely, which would mute the background music as well. I will assume that this will be fixed sometime in the future since this is a known issue:
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=9135
Issue 9135: MediaPlayer/VideoView and SeekTo before initial playback starts from beginning for few millisecs

I guess that can be a reason:
from api doc
Although the asynchronuous seekTo(int) call returns right way, the actual seek operation may take a while to finish, especially for audio/video being streamed. When the actual seek operation completes, the internal player engine calls a user supplied OnSeekComplete.onSeekComplete() if an OnSeekCompleteListener has been registered beforehand via setOnSeekCompleteListener(OnSeekCompleteListener).
now Videoview does not have OnSeekCompleteListener exposed and it sucks, but Videoview is just a wrapper class for Mediaplayer and SurfaceView