Develop Reference

Android Video streaming using HLS

I am assigned with a task to play a video in Android. Also, they mentioned if I use HLS it would be nicer. I tried playing video in VideoView, works good. I don't know anything about HLS. So I request, if I get some valuable resources on how to play video using HLS in android, it would be great.
Any leads are appreciated.
Thanks

The Android VideoView has limited steaming support (HLS, DASH, Smooth Stream, etc.) especially on older API versions. The best option would be to use the ExoPlayer library from google (or a wrapper around it like ExoMedia).
As an note, the streaming protocols are only supported on API 15+

RTMP vs HLS vs HDS

I would like to stream a VOD/Live on following platforms using JW player but not sure which streaming is best suited for each platform
Desktop
iOS
Android
I understand RTMP will not play on mobile devices.
So do I need to go for RTMP for desktop and HLS for mobile or can I use only the HLS streaming for all the 3 platforms?
Or is there any other way to efficiently stream VODs/Live?

You could simply fall back to a vod MP4 file for Android. Here is a set up - http://www.longtailvideo.com/support/jw-player/29394/hls-with-mp4-fallback

For live on iOS. HLS is your only option. Because of this I usually like to use HLS everywhere. For Desktop something like JWPlayer premium can play HLS in flash.

android video playback using mediaCodec in native code

I am trying to play a video in android native code using new API mediacodec. I dont want to go mediaPlayer way due to unavoidable reasons. can anybody share some code snippet as to how to go about it? Thanks in advance.

Your original question is too generic. And to be honest, create a new media player in native code is a huge task for your own.
If you are only seeking for some media player solution which has better supporting for variety of formats/codecs like VLC player, you can either try VLC lib which is open source but still in beta release. I have tried VLC, but it really has some crash issues or ANR issues, which is inside the whole framework.
Or you can try with Vitamio SDK which is a library without souce code. Check it out at this link: https://github.com/yixia/VitamioBundle Below is the feature list of it:
I have tried this solution, it is very stable, also some minor issue on 4.3, but still acceptable. So I am not posting any spam here, just copying from the official document:
Vitamio is an open multimedia framework or library for Android and iOS, with full and real hardware accelerated decoder and renderer. It's the simple, clean and powerful API of Vitamio that makes it famous and popular in multimedia apps development for Android and iOS.
According to the developers' feedback, Vitamio has been used by more than 1000 apps and 100 million users around the world.
Vitamio can play 720p/1080p HD mp4,mkv,m4v,mov,flv,avi,rmvb,rm,ts,tp and many other video formats in Android and iOS. Almost all popular streaming protocols are supported by Vitamio, including HLS(m3u8), MMS, RTSP, RTMP, and HTTP.
Network Protocols
The following streaming protocols are supported for audio and video playback:
MMS
RTSP (RTP, SDP), RTMP
HTTP progressive streaming
HLS - HTTP live streaming (M3U8)
And yes, Vitamio can handle on demand and live videos in all above protocols.
Media formats
Vitamio used FFmpeg as the demuxers and main decoders, many audio and video codecs are packed into Vitamio beside the default media format built in Android platform, some of them are listed below.
DivX/Xvid
WMV
FLV
TS/TP
RMVB
MKV
MOV
M4V
AVI
MP4
3GP
Subtitles
Vitamio support the display of many external and embedded subtitle formats.
SubRip(.srt)
Sub Station Alpha(.ssa) / Advanced Sub Station Alpha(.ass)
SAMI(.smi/.sami)
MicroDVD(.sub/.txt)
SubViewer2.0(.sub)
MPL2(.mpl/.txt)
Matroska (.mkv) Subtitle Track
More features
More wonderful features
Support wide range screens from small phone to large tablet
Multiple audio tracks support
Mutitiple subtitles support, including external and embedded ones
Processor optimization for many platforms
Buffering when streaming
Adjustable aspect ratio
Automatically text encoding detection

Android video stream mms and m3u8

I am trying to play some video streams from mms and m3u8 inside my Android application. It seems that the MediaPlayer doesn't have support on this and from what I have read on FFMPEG it seems there isn't any easy way with that also. I am using Android 2.1 SDK.
Any ideas on what I should in order to make this work? There are some apps there in the store that already do this, but I don't know how.

You may try the Vitamio library, http://vitamio.org
Vitamio is a multimedia framework for all Android devices. Vitamio works like the Android's default MediaPlayer except that it includes much more powerful features. And it's absolutely free !
The following network protocols are supported for audio and video playback:
MMS
RTSP (RTP, SDP)
HTTP progressive streaming
HTTP live streaming (M3U8), for Android 2.1+

Does android support RTSP streaming using the HTML5 video tag?

I know that android supports RTSP streaming if you use the native video player, but I have not been able to find if you can stream video on Android using the HTML5 tag.
The real reason I want to figure this out is I will be using Apple HTTP Live Streaming to serve video to the iPhone using HTML5 and would like to keep things simple and be able to simply define another streaming video source for android.
Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks.

No, it doesn't work and probably never will. However, from Android 3.0, HTTP Live Streaming is supported.
I recommend you use a flexible media server such as Wowza. It can stream HLS as well as RTSP and RTMP(Flash) from a single source.