Custom MediaPlayer class in android

Question

I have just finished a project where I use a webwiew for video playback. Now I am asked to replace the webview part with a custom player. The player should be capable to handle HLS.

If I use VideoView and MediaController, I can play live stream. But unfortunately, the MediaController has its own controls. I want my own controls and thats where I am stuck.

So far I tried:

1. To write the MediaController class all over again and try to change the layout. It didnt work because I could not clear all the errors due to the dependencies.
2. I tried using vidtry code (http://github.com/commonsguy/vidtry) for reference but no luck.
3. I tried to build a class that extends MediaController but that didnt work either.

I have been in almost every thread on Stackoverflow regarding custom media player but couldnt find information to get me started.
Is it possible to create a custom media player class without using NDK?
If someone knows how to create a custom media player class, please help me.

Answer 1

You could use VideoView on it's own and call it's methods to control playback such as start(), stopPlayback(), pause(), resume(), seekTo() etc. (See class reference here: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/widget/VideoView.html)

Just create your on-screen controls however you want (buttons/images) and bind your playback control code code to their events.

You will also want to disable the inbuilt VideoView controls by removing the touchable property in the layout.xml...

<VideoView 
    android:id="@+id/myVideoView" 
    android:layout_width="fill_parent" 
    android:layout_height="wrap_content" 
    android:clickable="false" >

Answer 2

I recommend using VLC as it support nearly all video formats, and of-course streaming. You can try to pick up on a pre-compiled libvlc AAR file from github or compile VLC by yourself: AndroidCompile.

Example of pre-compiled libvlc you can find here: https://github.com/mrmaffen/vlc-android-sdk

This is not the latest version by I believe it will be good for your needs. Next you will will need to create the code around the library. Example: https://github.com/Ivshti/libvlc-android-sample