Develop Reference

Multicasting in android

We have enabled multicast streaming in one of our machines using VLC server. We use the following URL for streaming the multicast data.
rtp://239.1.2.11:5004 & udp://239.1.2.11:1234
But when we pass these links to the VideoView or mediaplayer in android, we get the message as "Sorry, the video can not be played".
Is it the case that multicast streaming is not supported in android? (Though multicastsocket class is present in library) or are we missing anything?
The links play well on the VLC client so we don't think there is any issue in VLC server.
We are using android v2.3 for development.

I am not at all an expert in video encoding, but I think the problem is not with the streaming, I think it is with the encoding of your videos. You should have a look at Android Supported Media Formats and make sure that your video encoding,format,resolution meet the recommendation specified there.

Mandatory to use Darwin or wowza or VLC to stream live video in android?

I want to know is it mandatory to use any of the streaming servers like Darwin,Wowza or VLC to stream an RTSP live stream video? I am receiving an RTSP link from my client and it tends to change everytime. I can successfully play it in the VLC player but on phone I cant see anything. I tried playing a sample link having .3gp extension and it worked fine. But my links dont have an extension. They look like this rtsp://122.166.229.151:1950/1346a0cf0ef7c2. Please help me.If its compulsory to use an extension or a server, I will continue working in that direction.

A streaming server (as you describe) isn't strictly necessary - as long as you can pull RTSP from whatever your source is, you should be able to see it. Most IP cameras have onboard RTSP servers (although I wouldn't put too many connections on it). If you can see it in VLC, the phone should be able to consume it as well, given that the codec used to encode is one supported by the android device (in most cases, if you're doing H.264 Baseline 3.0 with AAC, you should be good to go).
A streaming server like Wowza can make that stream available to a wider audience than pulling directly from the source device, but if you're not intending to broadcast to a wide audience, it's not required for streaming to Android devices.
Newer versions of Android (Gingerbread and later) are also able to consume Apple HTTP Live Streaming.

Windows Media Services streaming (using RSTP or HTTP) to Android

Is it possible to stream video to an Android device by using Windows Media Services? Which protocol should I use between RTSP and HTTP? Actually, I have a video file (MP4 format) at a server and I want to stream video files to an Andriod device.

Currently Android does not support adaptive streaming. I searched for some methods a while ago, but Android does not support any of them. No streaming via Windows Media Server, no support for Flash Media Server and HTTP Live Streaming also does not work. The last one would be the best solution since it does not depend on proprietary protocols - but unfortunately it uses a different container format MPEG-TS and a playlist file M3U8 which Android does not understand at the moment. There is an issue for this - you might want to stare it. ;-)
That said, I would recommend you to just upload the MP4 file to an HTTP server and play it via the HTTP url. If it doesn't play, you have to add some extra streaming information by hinting it - e.g. with MP4Box:
mp4box -hint <filename>
Have fun. :-)

Video streaming using RTSP: Android

I'm trying to install a Wowza server on my Linux machine to enable the RTSP streaming for my Android application.
On Android client side what sort of changes do I need to make in my application? I'm using Videoview to simply play a video file stored locally.
Now I want to get the video content get streamed through the server that I've installed. If necessary I can move to any other streaming server as right now I'm doing a research on streaming servers.

For rtsp streaming you can also try following servers:
Darwin Streaming Server - linux package is available
Windows Media Services - can be installed on Windows Server Trial
VLC - standalone application
For testing purposes of your application i would also recommend you to use existing mobile video services like:
m.youtube.tv
m.wp.tv
You can extract video links from those sites and use them to test your application.
Try to follow Android ApiDemos, you can find video streaming player example at:
...android-sdk-windows\platforms\android-x\samples\ApiDemos\src\com\example\android\apis\media\MediaPlayerDemo_Video.java

VLC+Android Owns.
I used the following one-liner to stream video of our kittens to our cell phones.
We used the launchRTSP free app to leverage the built-in RTSP viewing capabilities of Android, to access the URL over the internet.
You may want to tweak the frame rate and such. As shown below, it's perfect for webcam streaming.
vlc -vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv -I dummy v4l2://:vdev=/dev/video:width=640:height=480:fps=2 --sout "#transcode{vcodec=mp4v,fps=5,vb=800,acodec=mpga,samplerate=8000,ab=64,deinterlace,channels=1,sfilter='mosaic:marq{marquee=%m-%d-%Y_%H:%M:%S,size=16,color=16711680,position=5,opacity=64}'}:rtp{sdp=rtsp://0.0.0.0:5858/kittens.sdp}"

WCS4 server can deliver WebRTC stream as RTSP.
So you can send WebRTC live stream from Android or desktop Chrome/FF browser and then connnect to this stream via VLC or Android by RTSP.

Android SDK : Playing video using mms protocol

Using the Android SDK, is it possible to play a video stream using the MMS protocol
I am streaming video from a PC using windows media.
I can use Windows Media Player to play the stream by just inputting the following URL in Windows Media Player
mms://192.168.223.194:8081
Is it possible to play the same stream using the Android SDK ?
Thanks

Either you are using old technology, or there are more efficient alternatives.
MMS as a protocol has been deprecated for seven years. Android supports HTTP and RTSP streaming, and since Microsoft headed in that direction as well, it is unlikely that Android will ever support MMS-the-protocol.
Windows Media Player uses MMS URLs (mms://) to represent a whole family of possible protocols, including RTSP, MMS, and HTTP. Android appears to treat mms:// as the equivalent of http:// and may not attempt to connect via RTSP. The best answer is for you to figure out the correct URL for the desired protocol (e.g., http:// or rtsp://). You could, if you wish, create some Android utility library that probes a server identified via an mms:// URL, determines what the real protocol is, and then returns a properly-formatted URL for the desired protocol.