Why does it take so long for Android's MediaPlayer to prepare some live streams for playback?

Question

I am finding big differences in the time it takes the Android MediaPlayer to prepare for live stream playback with different streams.

The hard data<

Answer 1

I have recently debugged this same issue with a streaming audio provider. The issue is related to stagefright and streaming sources 32kbps and lower. We stepped through the same streaming measuring the response time at 24, 32, 48, 64 and 128 kbps.

• 24 -> 46 seconds to start streaming
• 32 -> 24 seconds to start streaming
• 48 -> 2 seconds to start streaming
• 64 -> 2 seconds to start streaming
• 128 -> 2 seconds to start streaming

This is from a consistent, wireless connection averaged over 10 attempts at each bit rate. The key, as Travis pointed out, was that stagefright could not figure out how long to buffer the audio. Sometimes i would see a message 'error: 1,-21492389' or so, which seemed to crash the stagefright player silently. I tried to track this down and eventually came to the conclusion that the very slow streams (sub 24 kbps) seemed to cause a buffer overflow because they would buffer until the device ran out of space for the audio stream.

I wanted to add that OnBufferingUpdateListener did not fire at all for me during this entire test. I don't know what it is there for. I think the only way you can tell how loading is going is to proxy the loading, in a similar fashion to the NPR app mentioned above.