Rendering YUV format in android?

Question

I'm trying to stream video in android through ffmpeg,the output which i am getting after the decoding is YUV format.Is it possible to render YUV image format directly in the Android screen?

Answer 1

Yes and no.

The output of the camera and hardware video decoders is generally YUV. Frames from these sources are generally sent directly to the display. They may be converted by the driver, typically with a hardware scaler and format converter. This is necessary for efficiency.

There isn't an API to allow an app to pass YUV frames around the same way. The basic problem is that "YUV" covers a lot of ground. The buffer format used by the video decoder may be a proprietary internal format that the various hardware modules can process efficiently; for your app to create a surface in this format, it would have to perform a conversion, and you're right back where you were performance-wise.

You should be able to use GLES2 shaders to do the conversion for you on the way to the display, but I don't have a pointer to code that demonstrates this.

Update: an answer to this question has a link to a WebRTC source file that demonstrates doing the YUV conversion in a GLES2 shader.