1

I've made an app to view vine videos on Android devices. These are basically .mp4 videos being loaded into a VideoView. From the following documentation (http://developer.android.com/guide/appendix/media-formats.html), mp4 video playback is supported on Android version 3+ devices.

I've already added a android:minSdkVersion="11" to the manifest file to filter out older android versions from downloading the app, but I'm still getting feedback from users running newer versions of Android (eg. 4.1, 4.2) that complain about getting a "Video cannot be played" error message.

Since there's no way (that I know of, please correct me if I'm wrong) to test video playback using the emulator, I can't really know what's going on.

Is there any way to check for a device's ability to do video playback or at least get the emulator to play videos, so I can correctly fix this issue?

pd. for those interested, here's a link to my app in Google Play. As you can see, I'm being crushed by negative reviews: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.thirtymatches.vineflow

Henrique
  • 4,921
  • 6
  • 36
  • 61

1 Answers1

1

If you look at the Google compatibility matrix closely, you'll see that support for MP4/H264 encoding started with the Android 3.0 release. Playback of MP4/H.264 has been supported by all Android devices back to Android 1.0, so there's no need for you to limit availability to newer releases of Android (unless you have other API compatibility needs).

Via VideoView, the video playback on all these devices is done using the hardware decoder provided by the phone's chipset. So to guarantee compatibility, the video has to be encoded to lowest-common denominator. Google provides "Video Encoding Recommendations" at the bottom of the page you linked; I also wrote an answer describing how we transcoded to a form of MP4/H264 that plays across all Android devices.

Not knowing what Vine is doing with their video clips, it might be that the videos aren't all encoded with uniform encoder parameters. They might be taking the videos straight off handsets and streaming them without any additional server-side processing to ensure wide compatibility; I don't know. If that's the case, you might find it challenging to develop an Android app that can show the content without a) implementing your own software codec (as apps like RockPlayer, MX Player or VLC do) or b) transcoding the videos on a server (which probably will run afoul of Vine's terms of service).

Community
  • 1
  • 1
mportuesisf
  • 5,587
  • 2
  • 33
  • 26
  • 1
    After reading your post and seeing that it was not a pre/post 3+ android version issue, I tried to take a different approach and what ended up solving the problem was downloading the .mp4 video to the device, and then playing it. So, basically switching from videoView.setVideoURL to videoView.setVideoPath solved this issue. – Henrique Feb 08 '13 at 01:13