Develop Reference

Unable to use Android platform's MediaCodec class in "surface input" mode

I'm trying to write a simple video encoder that uses the Android platform's MediaCodec class in "surface input" mode.
These are the steps I'm following (supporting code left out for the sake of brevity):
mediaCodec = MediaCodec::CreateByType(looper, "video/avc", true);
mediaCodec->configure(config, NULL, NULL, CONFIGURE_FLAG_ENCODE);
mediaCodec->createInputSurface(&inputSurface);
mediaCodec->start();
Following this, I'm trying to dequeue a buffer from the created input surface (which is an IGraphiBufferProducer interface object), but it fails with the NO_INIT error:
inputSurface->dequeueBuffer(&slot, &fence, w, h, format, 0);
The error message in the ADB log is:
BufferQueueProducer: [GraphicBufferSource] dequeueBuffer: BufferQueue has no connected producer
Any idea why the buffer queue has no connected producer? I would assume that the MediaCodec class would handle the creation of the buffer queue as well as the connection of the producer and consumers to the queue.
I'm using Android API level 26 (7.1.2). I'm using the platform-level libs because my use case requires access to GraphicBuffer objects.
Thanks in advance!
EDIT: The general idea is to:
Dequeue buffers from the input surface & fill them.
Queue the filled buffers back to the input surface (which would presumably trigger the media codec (video encoder) instance that the surface belongs
to).
Dequeue output buffers (containing raw H.264 bitstream data) from the media codec instance, and write it to file.
Release output buffers back to the media codec instance.

From IGraphiBufferProducer documentation:
// * NO_INIT - the buffer queue has been abandoned or the producer is not
// connected.
I guess that the part that is missing in your code is this "connect".
IGraphiBufferProducer has such a method, are you using it?

MediaCodec.createInputSurface() throws IllegalStateException on some devices

I'm working on a video processing app. The app has one Activity that contains a Fragment. The Fragment in turn contains a VideoSurfaceView derived from GLSurfaceView for me to show the preview of the video with effect (using OpenGL) to users. After previewing, users can start processing the video.
To process the video, I mainly apply the method described in here.
Everything works fine on most devices, but the Oppo Mirror 3 (Android 4.4). On this device, everytime I try to create an Surface using MediaCodec.createInputSurface(), it throws out java.lang.IllegalStateException with code -38.
E/OMXMaster: A component of name 'OMX.qcom.audio.decoder.aac' already exists, ignoring this one.
E/SoftAVCEncoder: internalSetParameter: StoreMetadataInBuffersParams.nPortIndex not zero!
E/OMXNodeInstance: OMX_SetParameter() failed for StoreMetaDataInBuffers: 0x80001001
E/ACodec: [OMX.google.h264.encoder] storeMetaDataInBuffers (output) failed w/ err -2147483648
E/OMXNodeInstance: createInputSurface requires COLOR_FormatSurface (AndroidOpaque) color format
E/ACodec: [OMX.google.h264.encoder] onCreateInputSurface returning error -38
E/VideoProcessing: java.lang.IllegalStateException
at android.media.MediaCodec.createInputSurface(Native Method)
at com.ltpquang.android.core.processing.codec.VideoEncoder.<init>(VideoEncoder.java:46)
at com.ltpquang.android.core.VideoProcessing.setupVideo(VideoProcessing.java:200)
at com.ltpquang.android.core.VideoProcessing.<init>(VideoProcessing.java:167)
at com.ltpquang.android.ui.activity.PreviewEditActivity.lambda$btNext$12(PreviewEditActivity.java:723)
at com.ltpquang.android.ui.activity.PreviewEditActivity.access$lambda$12(PreviewEditActivity.java)
at com.ltpquang.android.ui.activity.PreviewEditActivity$$Lambda$13.run(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:841)
Playing around a little bit, I observed that:
BEFORE creating and adding the VideoSurfaceView to the layout, I can create MediaCodec encoder and obtain the input surface successfully. And I can create as many as I want if I release the previous MediaCodec before creating a new one, otherwise I can only obtain one and only one input surface regardless how many MediaCodec I have.
AFTER creating and adding the VideoSurfaceView to the layout, there is no chance that I can get the input surface from the MediaCodec, it thows java.lang.IllegalStateException always.
I've tried removing the VideoSurfaceView from the layout, set it to null, before creating the surface, but no luck for me.
I also tried with suggestions from here, or here, but they didn't help.
From this, it seems that my device can only get the software codec. So that I cant create the input surface.
My question is:
Why was that?
If the device's resources is limited, what can I do (release something for example) to continue the process?
If it is related to the software codec, what should I do? How can I detect and release the resource?
Is this related to GL contexts? If yes, what should I do? Should I manage the contexts my self?

Controlling Frame Rate of VirtualDisplay

I'm writing an Android application, and in it, I have a VirtualDisplay to mirror what is on the screen and I then send the frames from the screen to an instance of a MediaCodec. It works, but, I want to add a way of specifying the FPS of the encoded video, but I'm unsure how to do so.
From what I've read and experimented with, dropping encoded frames (based on the presentation times) doesn't work well as it ends up with blocky/artifact ridden video as opposed to a smooth video at a lower framerate. Other reading suggests that the only way to do what I want (limit the FPS) would be to limit the incoming FPS to the MediaCodec, but the VirtualDisplay just receives a Surface which is constructed from the MediaCodec as below
mSurface = <instance of MediaCodec>.createInputSurface();
mVirtualDisplay = mMediaProjection.createVirtualDisplay(
"MyDisplay",
screenWidth,
screenHeight,
screenDensity,
DisplayManager.VIRTUAL_DISPLAY_FLAG_AUTO_MIRROR,
mSurface,
null,
null);
I've also tried subclassing Surface and limit the frames that are fed to the MediaCodec via the unlockCanvasAndPost(Canvas canvas) but the function never seems to be called on my instance, so, there may be some weirdness in how I extended Surface and the interaction with the Parcel as writeToParcel function is called on my instance, but that is the only function that is called in my instance (that I can tell).
Other reading suggests that I can go from encoder -> decoder -> encoder and limit the rate in which the second encoder is fed frames, but that's a lot of extra computation that I'd rather not do if I can avoid it.
Has anyone successfully limited the rate at which a VirtualDisplay feeds its Surface? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Starting off with what you can't do...
You can't drop content from the encoded stream. Most of the frames in the encoded stream are essentially "diffs" from other frames. Without knowing how the frames interact, you can't safely drop content, and will end up with that corrupted macroblock look.
You can't specify the frame rate to the MediaCodec encoder. It might stuff that into metadata somewhere, but the only thing that really matters to the codec is the frames you're feeding into it, and the presentation time stamps associated with each frame. The encoder will not drop frames.
You can't do anything useful by subclassing Surface. The Canvas operations are only used for software rendering, which is unrelated to feeding in frames from a camera or virtual display.
What you can do is send the frames to an intermediate Surface, and then choose whether or not to forward them to the MediaCodec's input Surface. One approach would be to create a SurfaceTexture, construct a Surface from it, and pass that to the virtual display. When the SurfaceTexture's frame-available callback fires, you either ignore it, or render the texture onto the MediaCodec input Surface with GLES.
Various examples can be found in Grafika and on bigflake, none of which are an exact fit, but all of the necessary EGL and GLES classes are there.

You can reference the code sample from saki4510t's ScreenRecordingSample or RyanRQ's ScreenRecoder, they are all use the additional EGL Texture between the virtual display and media encoder, and the first one can keep at least 15 fps for the output video. You can search the keyword createVirtualDisplay from their code base for more details.

Android MediaCodec Format/Resolution Change mid-stream

I'm processing a live stream via MediaCodec and have a scenario where the MediaFormat changes mid-stream (ie: resolution of the video being decoded changes). Given I'm attaching the decoder to a Surface to render it as soon as I detect the change in resolution on the incoming stream I recreate the decoder before feeding it the new resolution buffer (providing it with the proper new MediaFormat).
I've been getting some weird errors which don't give me too much info as to what could be wrong, ie when calling MediaCodec.configure with the new format and same Surface:
android.media.MediaCodec$CodecException: Error 0xffffffea
at android.media.MediaCodec.native_configure(Native Method)
at android.media.MediaCodec.configure(MediaCodec.java:577)
Which when fetching the CodecException.getDiagnosticInfo it shows nothing that I can really use to understand the reason for the failure: android.media.MediaCodec.error_neg_22
I've also noted the following on the logs and found some related information and am wondering if there's something I need to do regarding the Surface itself (like detaching it from the old instance of the decoder being giving it to the new one):
07-09 15:00:17.217 E/BufferQueueProducer( 139): [SurfaceView] connect(P): already connected (cur=3 req=3)
07-09 15:00:17.217 E/MediaCodec( 5388): native_window_api_connect returned an error: Invalid argument (-22)
07-09 15:00:17.218 E/MediaCodec( 5388): configure failed with err 0xffffffea, resetting...

Looks like calling stop() and release() as well as reinitializing any references I had to the getInputBuffers() and getOutputBuffers() did the trick. At least I don't get the messages/exceptions anymore. Now I just need to figure out the Surface reference part as it seems the resized stream (when resolution changes) is still being fit in the original surface dimensions instead of adjusting the Surface for the new resolution.

If your encoder supports adaptive playback, then apparently you can alter some codec paramaters on the fly:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/34427724/1048170

SurfaceTexture's onFrameAvailable() method always called too late

I'm trying to get the following MediaExtractor example to work:
http://bigflake.com/mediacodec/ - ExtractMpegFramesTest.java (requires 4.1, API 16)
The problem I have is that outputSurface.awaitNewImage(); seems to always throw RuntimeException("frame wait timed out"), which is thrown whenever the mFrameSyncObject.wait(TIMEOUT_MS) call times out. No matter what I set TIMEOUT_MS to be, onFrameAvailable() always gets called right after the timeout occurs. I tried with 50ms and with 30000ms and it's the same.
It seems like the onFrameAvailable() call can't be done while the thread is busy, and once the timeout happens which ends the thread code execution, it can parse the onFrameAvailable() call.
Has anyone managed to get this example to work, or knows how MediaExtractor is supposed to work with GL textures?
Edit: tried this on devices with API 4.4 and 4.1.1 and the same happens on both.
Edit 2:
Got it working on 4.4 thanks to fadden. The issue was that the ExtractMpegFramesWrapper.runTest() method called th.join(); which blocked the main thread and prevented the onFrameAvailable() call from being processed. Once I commented th.join(); it works on 4.4. I guess maybe the ExtractMpegFramesWrapper.runTest() itself was supposed to run on yet another thread so the main thread didn't get blocked.
There was also a small issue on 4.1.2 when calling codec.configure(), it gave the error:
A/ACodec(2566): frameworks/av/media/libstagefright/ACodec.cpp:1041 CHECK(def.nBufferSize >= size) failed.
A/libc(2566): Fatal signal 11 (SIGSEGV) at 0xdeadbaad (code=1), thread 2625 (CodecLooper)
Which I solved by adding the following before the call:
format.setInteger(MediaFormat.KEY_MAX_INPUT_SIZE, 0);
However the problem I have now on both 4.1.1 (Galaxy S2 GT-I9100) and 4.1.2 (Samsung Galaxy Tab GT-P3110) is that they both always set info.size to 0 for all frames. Here is the log output:
loop
input buffer not available
no output from decoder available
loop
input buffer not available
no output from decoder available
loop
input buffer not available
no output from decoder available
loop
input buffer not available
no output from decoder available
loop
submitted frame 0 to dec, size=20562
no output from decoder available
loop
submitted frame 1 to dec, size=7193
no output from decoder available
loop
[... skipped 18 lines ...]
submitted frame 8 to dec, size=6531
no output from decoder available
loop
submitted frame 9 to dec, size=5639
decoder output format changed: {height=240, what=1869968451, color-format=19, slice-height=240, crop-left=0, width=320, crop-bottom=239, crop-top=0, mime=video/raw, stride=320, crop-right=319}
loop
submitted frame 10 to dec, size=6272
surface decoder given buffer 0 (size=0)
loop
[... skipped 1211 lines ...]
submitted frame 409 to dec, size=456
surface decoder given buffer 1 (size=0)
loop
sent input EOS
surface decoder given buffer 0 (size=0)
loop
surface decoder given buffer 1 (size=0)
loop
surface decoder given buffer 0 (size=0)
loop
surface decoder given buffer 1 (size=0)
loop
[... skipped 27 lines all with size=0 ...]
surface decoder given buffer 1 (size=0)
loop
surface decoder given buffer 0 (size=0)
output EOS
Saving 0 frames took ? us per frame // edited to avoid division-by-zero error
So no images get saved. However the same code and video works on 4.3. The video I am using is an .mp4 file with "H264 - MPEG-4 AVC (avc1)" video codec and "MPEG AAAC Audio (mp4a)" audio codec.
I also tried other video formats, but they seem to die even sooner on 4.1.x, while both work on 4.3.
Edit 3:
I did as you suggested, and it seems to save the frame images correctly. Thank you.
Regarding KEY_MAX_INPUT_SIZE, I tried not setting, or setting it to 0, 20, 200, ... 200000000, all with the same result of info.size=0.
I am now unable to set the render to a SurfaceView or TextureView on my layout. I tried replacing this line:
mSurfaceTexture = new SurfaceTexture(mTextureRender.getTextureId());
with this, where surfaceTexture is a SurfaceTexture defined in my xml-layout:
mSurfaceTexture = textureView.getSurfaceTexture();
mSurfaceTexture.attachToGLContext(mTextureRender.getTextureId());
but it throws a weird error with getMessage()==null on the second line. I couldn't find any other way to get it to draw on a View of some kind. How can I change the decoder to display the frames on a Surface/SurfaceView/TextureView instead of saving them?

The way SurfaceTexture works makes this a bit tricky to get right.
The docs say the frame-available callback "is called on an arbitrary thread". The SurfaceTexture class has a bit of code that does the following when initializing (line 318):
if (this thread has a looper) {
handle events on this thread
} else if (there's a "main" looper) {
handle events on the main UI thread
} else {
no events for you
}
The frame-available events are delivered to your app through the usual Looper / Handler mechanism. That mechanism is just a message queue, which means the thread needs to be sitting in the Looper event loop waiting for them to arrive. The trouble is, if you're sleeping in awaitNewImage(), you're not watching the Looper queue. So the event arrives, but nobody sees it. Eventually awaitNewImage() times out, and the thread returns to watching the event queue, where it immediately discovers the pending "new frame" message.
So the trick is to make sure that frame-available events arrive on a different thread from the one sitting in awaitNewImage(). In the ExtractMpegFramesTest example, this is done by running the test in a newly-created thread (see the ExtractMpegFramesWrapper class), which does not have a Looper. (For some reason the thread that executes CTS tests has a looper.) The frame-available events arrive on the main UI thread.
Update (for "edit 3"): I'm a bit sad that ignoring the "size" field helped, but pre-4.3 it's hard to predict how devices will behave.
If you just want to display the frame, pass the Surface you get from the SurfaceView or TextureView into the MediaCodec decoder configure() call. Then you don't have to mess with SurfaceTexture at all -- the frames will be displayed as you decode them. See the two "Play video" activities in Grafika for examples.
If you really want to go through a SurfaceTexture, you need to change CodecOutputSurface to render to a window surface rather than a pbuffer. (The off-screen rendering is done so we can use glReadPixels() in a headless test.)