I am in no love affair with Android development, that much should probably be clear at this point. I’ve picked up Java and some Android over the past two weeks. I have figured out quite a bit – and know there is oodles more to try to learn. One thing has perplexed me and I believe all signs point to Google’s Android releases.
Something I have taken for granted on the iOS side of development is the playback of audio media. iOS makes this extremely simple. It’s also reliable. Android has something called MediaPlayer – and it’s supposed to make the playback of files and streaming URLs easy too. It’s fairly straightforward and works pretty well for simple things. I imagined that streaming an Oauth signed URL would have been easy. It works, but buffering times are abnormally long. Anywhere from 2-10 seconds so far. The files I am streaming are all of the same bitrate. I don’t know if they are all on the same destination server or not however.
So playback is quite spotty – I am putting up a spinner ProgressBar widget. The same signed URL I paste into my browser plays back in about 2 seconds for all files. For Android, much longer typically. It’s frustrating.
Here is an article that I read which discusses the library. It makes me feel like it’s not my problem as much as it’s Google’s problem.