Programming Android, 2nd Edition

Chapter 16. Multimedia

In today’s world of converging technologies, the mobile phone is used for a variety of tasks beyond simple voice calls. Multimedia capabilities, or the playing and recording of audio and video, is one such significant task that many users find to be of great value. Take a quick look around and you will find people using the phone as a means to enjoy a variety of programs as well as share self-recorded media among friends. Android provides the APIs to easily access this capability as well as embed multimedia and its manipulation directly within an application.

Audio and Video

Android supports playback of most popular audio and video formats. It also lets you record some formats. Recordings are stored in files, and can optionally be put in a persistent media store. The MediaStore is the content provider within Android that enables the storing and sharing of media data such as images, video, and audio. Once placed within this content provider, metadata associated with the media files becomes available for other applications to use.

As of this writing, most Android devices currently on the market support the following audio and video formats. Note that device makers can add support for other formats not listed here.

Audio

AAC LC/LTP *

HE-AACv1 (AAC+)

HE-AACv2 (enhanced AAC+)

AMR-NB *

AMR-WB *

MP3

FLAC (Android 3.1+)

MIDI

Ogg Vorbis

PCM/WAVE

Video

H.263 *

H.264 AVC * (encode Android 3.0+)

MPEG-4 SP

VP8 (Android 2.3.3+)

The asterisk (*) indicates the formats for which encoding is available. ...