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

When I had this problem I decided to test if stream is available before opening the player. If you make the user to wait for a long time and the music will start it ok (it's not, but let's say it is ok). The worst case scenario is to make him wait for a long time and the music will never start! So, we have 2 situations:

• The live streaming scenario, like a radio station.
• The recorded mp3 file which is available online.

At the radio scenario we could check if the port is accepting connections (open/close state). If it is open prepare the player for the music, else do not prepare it at all.

public static boolean isLiveStreamingAvailable() {
        SocketAddress sockaddr = new InetSocketAddress(STREAMING_HOST, STREAMING_PORT);
        // Create your socket
        Socket socket = new Socket();
        boolean online = true;
        // Connect with 10 s timeout
        try {
            socket.connect(sockaddr, 10000);
        } catch (SocketTimeoutException stex) {
            // treating timeout errors separately from other io exceptions
            // may make sense
            return false;
        } catch (IOException iOException) {
            return false;
        } finally {
            // As the close() operation can also throw an IOException
            // it must caught here
            try {
                socket.close();
            } catch (IOException ex) {
                // feel free to do something moderately useful here, eg log the event
            }

        }
        return true;
    }

At the mp3 file scenario the things are a little bit different. You should check for the response code which follows after the http request.

public static boolean isRecordedStreamingAvailable() {
        try {
            HttpURLConnection.setFollowRedirects(false);
            // note : you may also need
            //        HttpURLConnection.setInstanceFollowRedirects(false)
            HttpURLConnection con =
                    (HttpURLConnection) new URL(RECORDED_URL).openConnection();
            con.setRequestMethod("HEAD");
            return (con.getResponseCode() == HttpURLConnection.HTTP_OK);
        }
        catch (Exception e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
            return false;
        }
    }