Does android mediaplayer support HLS audio streams?

Question

We have already developed an application which plays mp4 audio streams. Now we want to replace those mp4 streams with HLS streams (.m3u8) as iOS has out of the box support for playing HLS streams. Now we have tried playing streams with Android 5.1 and 6.0 devices and it appears to have HLS support with native android media player.

But on some of the 4.4 version devices we saw mediaplayer became unresponsive while doing operations like seek() etc.

Can anyone confirm whether native android mediaplayer has full support for HLS streams (.m3u8)?

Answer 1

I have the same problem but in my case I need to play video.

Though newer versions of the Android OS tend to perform somewhat better, Android fragmentation is still a problem and depending on the Android version, HLS may:

• not be supported at all (Android 2.3, Gingerbread)

• cause devices to crash (Android 3.0, Honeycomb)

• lack seeking ability, feature distorted images, and restart videos completely when in fullscreen (Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich)

• lack seeking ability, and throw an error and crash when in fullscreen (Android 4.1, Jelly Bean)

I've found some possible solutions:

• https://developer.jwplayer.com/sdk/android/docs/developer-guide/

• http://docs.brightcove.com/en/perform/mobile-sdks/hls-player/guides/hls-limitations.html

• http://superpowered.com/http-live-streaming-hls-android-audio-ios-hls-android-example

• http://google.github.io/ExoPlayer/guide.html#hls

Finally Im using ExoPlayer from Android 4.1 and MediaPlayer in previous versions.

Gradle dependency: compile 'com.google.android.exoplayer:exoplayer:r1.4.2'