add a new codec to Android?

Question

I'm very new to Android. Now i need to work on Adding my own codec to Android.I mean, I want to know what all the steps i need to take to add my own codec to android.

I'm very fresh to this i need some basic things, so can someone please explain the steps I need to take in order to add a new codec to Android?

Answer 1

This is virtually impossible to do in a portable way as all audio and video codecs are compiled at the platform level (due to the fact that most of the time they require hardware specific acceleration)

If you are only interested on this working on a specific hardware platform and have an unlocked bootloader (So you can boot a custom build of Android) you can compile the full Android platform from scratch using the AOSP as a base.

Depending on which version of Android you're targeting you're looking at adding code to either Opencore or Stagefright (The subsystems that Android uses for A/V decoding and parsing) here you can add audio decoders, audio encoders, video encoders, video decoders and container parsers.

Here is some discussion of adding to Stagefright:

http://freepine.blogspot.com/2010/01/overview-of-stagefrighter-player.html

http://groups.google.com/group/android-porting/msg/5d88e76845a22bbb

However unless the encoding scheme you wish to support is very simple (What are you wanting to add?) it is likely to be too CPU intensive for most Android devices to run without being able to offload some of the work to another system (like the radio chipset or the GPU).