Developing A Streaming Server For Android

Question

I am trying to develop a Streaming AV Media Server for use with an Android handset as the client. This instantly puts a constraint on me to develop a server that uses RTSP.

Answer 1

I'm not sure what your specific needs are, but for static files you might try combining Amazon S3 and CloudFront, which I believe supports RTSP.

Answer 2

Developing a RTSP streaming server with Netty is fairly straight forward task and doesn't take much of time. I myself have written it and it worked like a charm. You could look at the sample implementations of some other servers using Netty framework to get started.

Answer 3

OK, simple as this to stream using HTTP.

I created a virtual folder called 'Music' with IIS on WinXP and pointed it at a folder containing mp3 files. This is the complete Activity needed to stream a file (name hard-coded).

BTW, it's called SimpleNetRadio as I originally started playing around with Shoutcast streams.

package com.mycompany.SimpleNetRadio;

import android.app.Activity;
import android.media.AsyncPlayer;
import android.media.AudioManager;
import android.net.Uri;
import android.os.Bundle;

public class SimpleNetRadio extends Activity
{
    private AsyncPlayer ap = null;

    @Override
    public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        setContentView(R.layout.main);
    }

    @Override
    protected void onStart() {
        super.onStart();
        ap = (AsyncPlayer) getLastNonConfigurationInstance();
    }

    @Override
    protected void onStop() {
        super.onStop();
        if (ap != null)
            ap.stop();
    }

    @Override
    protected void onResume() {
        super.onResume();

        if (ap == null) {
            ap = new AsyncPlayer("Simple Player");
            ap.play(this, Uri.parse("http://192.168.1.1/Music/02%20-%20Don't%20Stop%20Believin'.mp3"), true, AudioManager.STREAM_MUSIC);
        }
    }

    @Override
    public Object onRetainNonConfigurationInstance() {
        return ap;
    }
}

You should also be able to do this with MediaPlayer with a bit more code - it would handle error conditions better and wouldn't require much more work.