Android MediaPlayer takes long time to prepare and

Question

My application takes a long time to prepare and buffer an audio stream. I have read this question Why does it take so long for Android's MediaPlayer to prepare some live streams for playback?, however it just says people have experienced this issue, it does not state how to improve the problem.

I am experiencing this in all versions of Android, tested from 2.2 - 4.1.2.

The streams are in a suitable bit-rate for mobile and 3G connection. The same stream takes less than a second to start buffering in the equivalent iOS app.

Is there a way to specify the amount of time that should be buffered? I know that the Tune In radio application offers this feature ( https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=tunein.player ).

Thanks.

Edit: I've tested again and found that it only happens on devices running Gingerbread and above (>=2.3). I know that Android changed the underlying framework from OpenCore to StageFright. So how can I optimise the media framework? It just seems wrong that the old HTC Wildfire can prepare, stream and play, literally 10x faster than the brand new HTC One X and Nexus 7.

Answer 1

There really isn't much you can do since the Android MediaPlayer class doesn't provide access to lower level settings such as buffer size. The only alternative would be to make your own player using AudioTrack and a library like FFmpeg to do the decoding.

Answer 2

The one thing I'd recommend is to play around with encoding. For instance, for MP4s, ensure that the MOOV Atom is located at the beginning of the file (there are enough questions on S/O regarding how to do this with ffmpeg, etc). With MP3s, you can look at different codecs or bitrates for instance.

You can, for instance, try a number of audio files you find online, and if you see one that doesn't take a long time to buffer, try to encode your files in the same way.

Answer 3

I have struggled with this question for months. Finally i found the solution.

The real problem is in the implementation of the MediaPlayer class. Particularly with the way MediaPlayer buffers the data. This is why the solution is to create your own buffering, save it to a temp file and feed that to MediaPlayer.

This tutorial and source code explain exactly how. http://androidstreamingtut.blogspot.nl/2012/08/custom-progressive-audio-streaming-with.html

By adapting this code, it is easy to create a much better streaming player.

Google Developers really screwed up here.

EDIT : This answer is rather old. Nowdays i would recommend not using MediaPlayer and use ExoPlayer instead. It is extendable, stable and can play many different types of media. You can find it here: https://github.com/google/ExoPlayer/