Friday 4 January 2013

JJPlayer 1.0-a1

I decided I had enough hacked into the JJPlayer code to warrant a release - this one is actually (somewhat) usable as a player now. Unlike the previous which were totally broken. I'm getting a bit bored with it so it seemed as good a point as any.

My ainol elf 2 can manage a test 720p h.264 file pretty well - with only the occasional group of stutters on complex scenes with an eventual catch up. Unfortunately the Mele can barely handle PAL MPEG ... Update: I was working on some decoding-skipping throttle code, and for whatever reason, the Mele can now handle PAL MPEG just fine (nothing to do with the new code). No idea ... maybe i/o related - the Mele seems to go funny after suspend too.

I managed to fit in a few useful things in no particular order:

  • Runs full-screen - no navigation or title bars (they return temporarily on touch);
  • Busy spinner when opening;
  • Open is performed asynchronously;
  • Seek mostly works;
  • Much better stability;
  • Display of frames can be dropped to try to catch up;
  • Video is synced to the audio and usually works (it doesn't drift at any rate);
  • Basic Android activity lifecycle stuff works, pause/resume, etc;
  • Improved the startup time;
  • Keeps the screen turned on (i think);
  • Some developer oriented debug stuff; and
  • A preferences page.

There are still some unsolved issues wrt audio sync, pixels are assumed square, the possibility of more aggressive frame dropping (i.e. not decoding B frames and/or I frames, etc), very inefficient memory use (e.g. i have 31 AVFrame buffers and 31 YUV textures although I only need 2 of the latter), performance, jarring UI manoeuvres when the UI is shown/hidden, and many others I can't be bothered enumerating at this point. And that doesn't include the 'missing features' like a pause button or subtitles.

Most of the Android specific code is a huge mess - experiments are still on-going.

See the downloads link in the jjmpeg project.

But if you're after a more polished free software Android video player, go look at Dolphin Player. Although that seems to have some audio glitches and drift, and is implemented afaict as a native SDL app ported to Android rather than as a Java player.

Whilst writing this my ADSL network went down - probably heat related - so maybe thats a hint to go drink beer instead of hack. Might start with the coffee i brewed and forgot to drink this morning - that'll make a nice iced coffee. Mmm, blenders.

We're in the middle of a heat-wave and I should probably be at the beach or something - but the house is (relatively) cool and I can get out and water the garden to keep it alive here ... meant to be 44 degrees today, but that isn't even enough to get a record. Yesterday I got out an IR thermometer and measured 75 degrees on the lid of a plastic green sulo bin that isn't even in full-sun all day. Today has the added bonus of being windy too - feels like being inside a fan-forced oven when you walk outside. Maybe it's better not to go riding in such weather ...

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