In my Android app I'd like the user to tap an image once, have a youtube video play automatically and when the video is done the user is immediately returned to the app. What's the best way to do this in Android?
I tried using intents. This works in that the video comes up on what I think is a youtube web page. However playing the video requires another tap. I'd like to avoid this if possible.
I tried the whole MediaPlayer, prepareAsync, setOnPreparedListener and never got it to work. For some reason onPrepared was never called. No exceptions were thrown. I'm using the emulator to test and I'm new to Android so I'm not sure if the behavior will be different on physical devices.
I got this working well on iOS by getting creative with webviews. I'm hoping it's more straightforward on Android. The docs sure make it sound straight forward.
Cheers!
Update: Everything below is still correct, but the official YouTube API for Android is now available.
By far, the easiest way to play a YouTube video on Android is to simply fire an Intent to launch the native Android YouTube app. Of course, this will fail if you are not on a certified Google device, that doesn't have the complement of Google apps. (The Kindle Fire is probably the biggest example of such a device). The problem with this approach is that the user will not automatically wind up back at your app when the video finishes; they have to press the Back button, and at this point you've probably lost them.
As a second option, you can use the MediaPlayer API to play YouTube videos. But there are three caveats with this approach:
1) You need to make a call to YouTube's GData webservice API, passing it the ID of the video. You'll get back a ton of metadata, along with it the RTSP URL that you should pass to MediaPlayer to play back an H.264-encoded stream. This is probably the reason why your attempt to use MediaPlayer failed; you probably weren't using the correct URL to stream.
2) The GData/MediaPlayer approach will only play back low-resolution content (176x144 or similar). This is a deliberate decision on the part of YouTube, to prevent theft of content. Of course, this doesn't provide a very satisfactory experience. There are back-door hacks to get higher resolution streams, but they aren't supported on all releases of Android and using them is a violation of YouTube's terms of service.
3) The RTSP streams can be blocked by some internal networks/firewalls, so this approach may not work for all users.
The third option is to embed a WebView in your application. There two approaches you can take here:
1) You can embed a Flash object and run the standard desktop Flash player for YouTube. You can even use the Javascript API to control the player, and relay events back to the native Android app. This approach works well, but unfortunately Flash is being deprecated on the Android platform, and will not work for Android 4.1 and later.
2) You can embed a <video> tag to play YouTube via HTML5. Support for this varies between various releases of Android. It works well on Android 4.0 and later; earlier releases have somewhat spotty HTML5 <video> support. So, depending upon what releases of Android your application must support, you can take a hybrid approach of embedding HTML5 on Android 4.x or later, and Flash for all earlier versions of Android.
There are several threads here on StackOverflow about using HTML5 to play YouTube video; none of them really describe the entire process you must follow in one place. Here's links to a few of them:
Android - How to play Youtube video in WebView?
How to embed a YouTube clip in a WebView on Android
Play Youtube HTML5 embedded Video in Android WebView
All of this will get dramatically easier in the weeks/months to come; at Google I/O 2012, they presented/demoed a new YouTube API for Android that will support direct embedding of YouTube content in your application, with full support back to Android 2.2 (about 95% of the Android userbase as of this writing). It can't arrive fast enough.
Related
=== BACKGROUND SUMMARY===
At this moment, we are using Android VideoView to perform video play black. Everything seems to be working great until we encounter Live Streaming.
VideoView tends to have 10-15 seconds delay from the live stream within a local network (LAN).
While attempting to solve this issue, we came across VLC Embed for Android. After searching on the Internet, it seems there isn't any article compare pros and cons of using Android VLC Embed vs. Android VideoView.
=== QUESTION ===
What's the advantage (pros) and disadvantage (cons) of using Android
VLC Embed vs. Android VideoView?
Is VLC Embed stable?
Anything I should be careful when switching existing VideoView to VLC?
Thank you all in advanced
My view may not be very professional but it's about what I've experienced so far.
First, Android VideoView is good since it comes with the Android SDK so it does not require external library. But this one has some limits. For example, as far as I know, it doesn't support MMS and MMSH protocols and some others I didn't quote. Which is not the case for Android VLC SDK. This library is complete and supports almost all media formats I know so far.
It just increases your apk on size, on my side that's the only disadvantage.
Is the Android VLC SDK stable? Yes it's stable and maintained by a huge community.
Anything I should be careful when switching existing VideoView to VLC?
You should keep your sources same and care about aspect ratio.
What's the advantage (pros) and disadvantage (cons) of using Android VLC Embed vs. Android VideoView?
Advantage：
More features. VLC supports almost all media formats, hardware decoding. audio tracks, subtitles, chapter are also supported.
More integrated, simpler logic. You can easily get media information and cache them. The playback engine will proactively notify state changes and events, just register player event listening.
Disadvantage:
APK file size increas. If both arm64-v8a and armeabi-v7a are supported, it will increase more than 30MB.
Multiple instances are not perfect. For example, playing 2 videos at the same time is a hassle.
Is VLC Embed stable?
Stable. Starting with VLC 2.0.x (now 3.0.x), I use the VLC library in my Android App. It runs steadily from Android 5.1 to Android 8.0. A small number of 4k h265 video playback is not normal, but can be resolved by displaying "Can not play".
Anything I should be careful when switching existing VideoView to VLC?
To use LibVLC on Android The Medialibrary(org.videolan.medialibrary) is also required. You also need to note the licenses.
VLC for Android is licensed under GPLv3
This may be a concern for you if your project uses a different license.
I want to embed video's on our website that should work with these restrictions:
The video needs to start as soon as the user clicks on play. As far as I can tell this means that the video must be either streamed or it must use progressive downloads.
The video must not be downloadable by sending the link to other people.
The video must be protected against being viewed without being allowed to do so.
The video must work on all devices, also the ones that do not support flash such
as iOS and android
As a backend I use amazon cloudfront. So far we have used RTMP, but that obviously does not work for iOS or android devices.
What we’re planning to do is this:
For flash platforms we use RTMP with the amazon signed URL’s to prevent anyone to view the content.
For iOS we want to use HLS with a generated m3u8 file that contains signed URL’s to the TS files
For Andoid devices I'm not yet sure what to use.
My questions are these:
Is this a viable setup, or are is there a superior setup that ticks all the boxes?
What should we use for the android case?
I would suggest, use pre-signed hls/m3u8 for both ios and flash.(https://github.com/mangui/HLSprovider). For Android you can use normale html5 video streams with quality selection (signed URLs of course).
For Android you have to use RTSP protocol.
Wowza media server is the perfect solution for you.
You can see the player live here:
www.stateofpsychosis.com/media/
The viewable player is a custom player. The default SC player has been shrunk down to a 1x1px iframe so it can't be seen without using the developer tools to make changes to the style.
This is only a problem on Chrome for Android
For some reason I can't get the API to actually play the music. The Previous/Next buttons work in the sense that they query and change the info, but they won't play the song either. It does however change the default SoundCloud widget play button to a pause button. It changes the track info. But it just won't actually make any noise. If I make the widget viewable and push anything in the default player (as opposed to the custom one), it seems to work though.
I too, am facing the same issue.
It seems that Chrome for Android restricts the ability to trigger HTML5 audio playing. This is to protect users from extra data usage on their phones. It seems that triggering the audio to play from a script is not allowed.
You can read more about the issue
here
Hopefully they lift this restriction in the near future.
Is there anyway to bypass the blocked videos on mobile? First I tried to fire up normal youtube intent, then I used WebView (using both video and iframe tags), and lastly I changed the user agent of WebView to a desktop client but none of the above mentioned way worked. I tried rtsp to stream the video using VideoView but it would only give me a low quality 3gp video, which is what Youtube API gives.
I am running out of options. Any help would be highly appreciated.
Thanks!
I ran into the same thing with some of our videos on YouTube and found out that only YouTube controls if it will be allowed to show on a mobile. We never found a work-around for it other than hosting the video on our server or using Vimeo. But as it stands,YouTube has control over mobile viewing. Also do you have that video monetized? Monetizing a video on YouTube can also cause them to not allow it on mobile especially if it has any content that YouTube is saying is a Third Party or Copyright infringement. They told us we had third party content when it was all shot by us. Further reading in that problem showed that YouTube's new digital fingerprint is the main culprit for creating a new wave of problems for users trying to upload their own videos they made and own. i.e., a user tried to upload a video of his backyard with birds in it and the birds were singing. When he tried to upload it, YouTube said it was Copyrighted! How do you Copyright bird chirps everyone is now asking!
So try Vimeo or use your own server to deliver the content. Sorry I can't offer more help.
I remember being able to bypass the block as a user by asking the desktop version of the YouTube site and then watching the video with the (not updated anymore) Flash Player for Android. So maybe you could try pretending to be the Flash Player when asking for the video from your app. Maybe use a network sniffer to see what it's doing.
User "OMA" gave an answer (use 'Desktop Mode'), that sometimes works and is easy to try.
Next up is this Site (or a similar one): http://www.mobileyt.com/ which accepts an URL, then shows your Video.
A Proxy Server might assist you with access, particularly if it is a 'Country Restriction' (for Mobile, but does not mention the Country Restriction only the Mobile one). Any ADs served to that Country may be poorly received (Language / Customs); so it is blocked.
You can try a Spoofing Application for your Mobile Browser (Hint: Spoof you Browse with the Opera Browser OR use Explorer 10 on WinXP they won't be ready for that).
Combining those techniques can assist in difficult cases. You can also resort to downloading the Video and playing it with MX Player or VLC (for Mobile).
Good luck, and if at first you don't succeed ...
I am trying to design a video website compatible with Android. A good example of what I'm trying to achieve is vimeo.com. They show a thumbnail of a video. When you tap it, the native Android player comes up in full screen:
Currently, I have an anchor to an FLV containing an h.264 encoded video:
click here to watch
When you tap the anchor on Android, it downloads the video rather than plays it. That's not what I want. How do I get it to play full screen in the native player like Vimeo? But unlike Vimeo, I would like the video to expand so that there's not so much black empty space around the actual video.
Ahh I see what you mean, clicking a Vimeo video opens the Android dialog of selecting which app should respond to that request (in my case just the browser (which downloads the file) or video player (which opens and plays it as you wanted)). This is normal Android behavior- if you have not defined which app should respond to a given request, it will ask you to select from among the supporting applications.
Have you even tried embedding a video in the way suggested through the link I gave you? You may find that it will have the exact effect the Vimeo video does. HTML5 <video> element on Android
EDIT: Actually I think your real problem is probably just that the file format you're using (.flv) is not among the core media formats supported by Android. http://developer.android.com/guide/appendix/media-formats.html
if you have the correct codec installed to play the video and doesn't work, check and make sure you have the correct mime types configured and that something in the registry or a file isn't overwriting.
use the old standard of defining mp4 and falling back to flash.
In mobile Safari and Android webkit there are javascript methods and events defined on the Video object that can help with this. There is another StackOverflow question dealing with this topic (for iPad, but I have used this on Android phones as well).
Web App - iPad webkitEnterFullscreen - Programatically going full-screen video
Mobile Safari documentation: http://developer.apple.com/library/safari/#documentation/AudioVideo/Reference/HTMLVideoElementClassReference/HTMLVideoElement/HTMLVideoElement.html