Android: Recording and Streaming at the same time

Question

This is not really a question as much as it is a presentation of all my attempts to solve one of the most challenging functionalities I was faced with.

I use libstreaming library to stream realtime videos to Wowza Server and I need to record it at the same time inside the SD card. I am presenting below all my attempts in order to collect new ideias from the community.

Copy bytes from libstreaming stream to a mp4 file

Development

We created an interception in libstreaming library to copy all the sent bytes to a mp4 file. Libstreaming sends the bytes to Wowza server through a LocalSocket. It users MediaRecorder to access the camera and the mic of the device and sets the output file as the LocalSocket's input stream. What we do is create a wrapper around this input stream extending from InputStream and create a File output stream inside it. So, every time libstreaming executes a reading over the LocaSocket's input stream, we copy all the data to the output stream, trying to create a valid MP4 file.

Impediment

When we tried to read the file, it is corrupted. We realized that there are meta information missing from the MP4 file. Specifically the moov atom. We tried to delay the closing of the streaming in order to give time to send this header (this was still a guessing) but it didn't work. To test the coherence of this data, we used a paid software to try to recover the video, including the header. It became playable, but it was mostly green screen. So this became an not trustable solution. We also tried using "untrunc", a free open source command line program and it couldn't even start the recovery, since there was no moov atom.

Use ffmpeg compiled to android to access the camera

Development

FFMPEG has a gradle plugin with a java interface to use it inside Android apps. We thought we could access the camera via command line (it is probably in "/dev/video0") and sent it to the media server.

Impediment

We got the error "Permission Denied" when trying to access the camera. The workaround would be to root the device to have access to it, but it make the phones loose their warranty and could brick them.

Use ffmpeg compiled to android combined with MediaRecorder

Development

We tried to make FFMPEG stream a mp4 file being recorded inside the phone via MediaRecorder

Impediment

FFMPEG can not stream MP4 files that are not yet done with the recording.

Use ffmpeg compiled to android with libstreaming

Development

Libstreaming uses LocalServerSocket as the connection between the app and the server, so we thought that we could use ffmpeg connected with LocalServerSocket local address to copy the streaming directly to a local file inside the SD card. Right after the streaming started, we also ran the ffmpeg command to start recording the data to a file. Using ffmpeg, we believed that it would create a MP4 file in the proper way, which means with the moov atom header included.

Impediment

The "address" created is not readable via command line, as a local address inside the phone. So the copy is not possible.

Use OpenCV

Development

OpenCV is an open-source, cross-platform library that provides building blocks for computer vision experiments and applications. It offers high-level interfaces for capturing, processing, and presenting image data. It has their own APIs to connect with the device camera so we started studding it to see if it had the necessary functionalities to stream and record at the same time.

Impediment

We found out that the library is not really defined to do this, but more as image mathematical manipulation. We got even the recommendation to use libstreaming (which we do already).

Use Kickflip SDK

Development

Kickflip is a media streaming service that provides their own SDK for development in android and IOS. It also uses HLS instead of RTMP, which is a newer protocol.

Impediment

Their SDK requires that we create a Activity with camera view that occupies the entire screen of the device, breaking the usability of our app.

Use Adobe Air

Development

We started consulting other developers of app's already available in the Play Store, that stream to servers already.

Impediment

Getting in touch with those developers, they reassured that would not be possible to record and stream at the same time using this technology. What's more, we would have to redo the entire app from scratch using Adobe Air.

UPDATE

Webrtc

Development

We started using WebRTC following this great project. We included the signaling server in our NODEJS server and started doing the standard handshake via socket. We were still toggling between local recording and streaming via webrtc.

Impediment

Webrtc does not work in every network configuration. Other than that, the camera acquirement is all native code, which makes a lot harder to try to copy the bytes or intercept it.

Answer 1

As soon as OpenCV 3.0 is available (the RC1 can be downloaded here), we could add another option to this list:

Using OpenCV's built in Motion-JPEG encoder