Can someone please explain the steps I need to take in order to add a
new codec to Android?
Also, I would like the codec to be installed as part of an application
installation (or first launch) and NOT as part of a full Android OS
build.
The reason I want to do this is that I have an application that needs
to show a video of a non supported codec (HLS or TS), but I wouldn't
want to build a full blown video player - just integrate with the
existing, built-in, player.
Thanks,
Alik.
Can someone please explain the steps I need to take in order to add a new codec to Android?
Build your own firmware, or build your own media player (like VLC for Android).
Also, I would like the codec to be installed as part of an application installation (or first launch) and NOT as part of a full Android OS build.
That is not possible, unless you build your own media player.
The reason I want to do this is that I have an application that needs to show a video of a non supported codec (HLS or TS), but I wouldn't want to build a full blown video player - just integrate with the existing, built-in, player.
VLC for Android is due out (at least for some phones) shortly, so it may be able to play your format.
I think it maybe possible to add custom codec(though I have not tried) by referring to the android developer page Adding custom codec to android.
You can try out adding your codec through openMAX IL layer then call up the android media player to play it(I believe vlc has done in this way but uses its own player). The awesome player, the android default player, just fetch a list of codecs available through openMAX API and if there is a codec, it plays. So it is worth to try adding your codec during initialization of your app, and call up media player.
Related
Let me refraise my question, I wrote it in a hurry.
Current situation:
I have set up a digital video recorder to record broadcasts provided via DVB-C. It is running on a raspberry 3B using TVHeadend and jetty/cling to provide UPnP and other possibilities to access media files. For watching recordings, I wrote an android player app using IJKPlayer, which runs on smartphones, FireTV and AndroidTV.
One hassle when playing media files which are currently beeing recorded is, that IJKPlayer doesn not support timeshifting. Means, when I start playing a currently recording file, I can only watch the length which is known by the player at that moment. Anything which is recorded afterwards can not be played. I need to exit the player activity and start it again. I have resolved that issue by "simulating" a completed recoding using a custom servlet implementation. Since the complete length of the recording is already known, I can use ffmpeg to accomplish this.
Future situation:
I plan to move away from IJKPlayer to ExoPlayer, because it supports hardware playback and is much faster when playing h.264 media. I can of course use the same solution like above, but as far as I have found out yet, ExoPlayer can support media files which are currently being recorded by using the Timeline class. However, I don't seem to find neither a usefull documentation nor any good example. Hence, I would appreciate any help with the timeline object.
Regards
Harry
Looks like my approach won't work. At least, I didn't find a solution. Problem is, that the server returns the stream size as it is during player-start-time. I didn't find a method to update the media duration for "regular" files.
However, I can solve the problem by changing the server side. Instead of accessing a regular file, I convert the file to m3u8 in realtime, using ffmpeg. I then throw the m3u8 URI onto the player and it updates the duration of the stream (while playing) without the need to create any additional code on the client side.
=== 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.
After an intense search on this site I found nothing which fits
my problem. I want to write a small video streaming client on
an Android 5.1 device. The following code is used:
QApplication a(argc, argv);
QWidget *widget=new QWidget;
widget->resize(320,200);
QMediaPlayer *player=new QMediaPlayer;
QVideoWidget *vw= new QVideoWidget;
QHBoxLayout *layout=new QHBoxLayout;
layout->addWidget(vw);
widget->setLayout(layout);
player->setVideoOutput(vw);
player->setMedia(QUrl("rtsp://wowzaec2demo.streamlock.net/vod/mp4:BigBuckBunny_115k.mov"));
player->play();
widget->show();
The problem is, the sound works but I only get a white screen.
the sound is playing but no video.
The VLC player on the android device is playing the video
correctly. I also used a small player in android studio and
it plays the video (but with high latency, so it is not useful for me)
I ran out of options what I can change to make it run.
Qt is not media friendly, if you want to play specific format/codec like MOV or h.264/h.265 ect... in a crossplatform way I advise you to use external lib like QtAV (http://www.qtav.org/) or VLC Qt wrapper (https://github.com/RSATom/QmlVlcDemo)
I believe the problem is that Android devices do not support the QuickTime Format (MOV) by default.
VLC Media Player on the other side, is well-known to be able to correctly play MOV videos.
Try testing videos with another format such as MP4or WebM to see how the program behaves.
I once developed a desktop software for streaming audio/video in Qt and I had the pleasure to work with the GStreamer framework.
Among many functionalities, it allows you to convert MOV videos to other formats.
You may check the GStreamer for Android tutorials and QtGstreamer, a set of well-implemented GSstreamer bindings for Qt.
I have been trying to record audio/video on Android device and play it back using Open MAX AL APIs.
So far, audio playback part works smoothly. I referred native-media example to play mp4 file from the SD card using Media Player object. Before trying video playback, I started exploring audio recording.
While trying recording, I realized that Engine::CreateMediaRecorder returns SL_RESULT_FEATURE_UNSUPPORTED.
Does that mean, Android does not support recording through OpenMAXAL APIs?
This link partially talks about some of the features except Media Recorder. Where are the Android supported features of OpenMAXAL documented?
Yes, it is not supported. Please refer this reply from Glenn Kasten.
I'm writing an app for a multimedia website I frequent and I've run into a problem.
After grabbing a video stream URL (h264 wrapped in an mp4 container) and attempting to play it with the native video player, it fails.
This is on my Moto Droid running 2.2 (BB) and 2.3 (CM7). I've tested the app on my Xoom (3.1 stock) and it works great.
I've also had a friend test it on her Xperia Arc (2.3 stock as far as i know) and it worked for her. Makes me think it's a hardware decoder issue since I can play the stream fine using RockPlayer's software decoder but can't using the hardware one.
So I have three things here I want to find out:
Does the native Android player support software decoding. if so, how do I tell if it's using hardware or software and is it possible to toggle?
are there any 3rd part media players with readily available SDKs (free).
How can I just open the video in another app like Rock Player since I know it works. When I download a video using the browser, it asks me what video player I want it to use. How can I get this to pop up within my app and then send the video to it?
Yes, Android provides software h264 decoder, but it may not be available in 2.2. You can prefer software codec, see AOSP source code for stagefright:
usage: stagefright [options] [input_filename]
…
-s(oftware) prefer software codec
…
ffmpeg has many derivatives and wrappers on Android, which are available with a variety of license restrictions.
It's pretty easy to launch an Intent that targets a specific app. You can use setComponent() to match exactly the Activity you need. The better and more flexible way to deal with the problem is to create a custom Chooser (see e.g. Custom filtering of intent chooser based on installed Android package name), to let the user decide which player she/he prefers. With a custom chooser, you can decide to hide some of the handlers that are registered to the Action (e.g. not use the system player on Android version below 3.0).