How to stream and download a media from local storage using Android's VideoView?

Question

I have to stream and download video files from a server and show it in VideoView, well thanks to google, VV doesn't support my requirement naturally so this is what I have done:

1-create a HTTP proxy using NanoHTTPD and start downloading a file from server

2-start VideoView and set uri to my HTTP proxy

3-inside server() in my proxy I started to response to VideoView same as a real server with appropriate response headers ( I mean content-length/content-range with 206 response)

but the problem starts when VideoView, it reads like 300kb of video file properly and after that it requests from 619kb or something. I don't have any clue why would VV wants to hop from 300,000bytes and suddenly jump to 619,000bytes , and after 10 attempts it will respond me with ERROR -1004 inside c++ code of VideoView which I couldn't find any clue what is that.

following is my complete solution. any help is appreciated as I became clueless about VideoView and it's bizarre behavior!!!

Note : I have fixed the size of file deliberately, nothing wrong with it.

package com.example.videoBuffer2;

import android.app.Activity;
import android.net.Uri;
import android.os.Bundle;
import android.util.Log;
import android.view.View;
import android.widget.Button;
import android.widget.MediaController;
import android.widget.VideoView;

import java.io.*;
import java.util.Map;

public class MyActivity extends Activity {
    /**
     * Called when the activity is first created.
     */
    Button btn;
    VideoView videoView;
    @Override
    public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        setContentView(R.layout.main);
        btn = (Button) findViewById(R.id.button);
        videoView = (VideoView) findViewById(R.id.videoView);
        MediaController mediaController = new
                MediaController(this);
        videoView.setMediaController(mediaController);
        final VideoStreamServer server = new VideoStreamServer(9090);

        btn.setOnClickListener(new View.OnClickListener() {
            @Override
            public void onClick(View v) {
                try {
                    server.start();
                } catch (IOException e) {
                    e.printStackTrace();
                }
                videoView.setVideoURI(Uri.parse("http://127.0.0.1:9090/1.mp4"));
                videoView.requestFocus();

                videoView.start();
            }
        });
    }


    public class VideoStreamServer extends NanoHTTPD
    {

        public VideoStreamServer(int port) {
            super(port);
        }

        @Override
        public Response serve(String uri, Method method, Map<String, String> headers, Map<String, String> parms, Map<String, String> files) {

            //range=bytes=619814-
            long range;

            if (headers.containsKey("range"))
            {
                String contentRange = headers.get("range");
                range = Integer.parseInt(contentRange.substring(contentRange.indexOf("=") + 1, contentRange.indexOf("-")));
            }
            else
                range = 0;


            byte[] buffer;
            int constantLength = 256000;
            long bufLength=0;
            boolean isLastPart=false;
            try {

                RandomAccessFile ff =new RandomAccessFile(new File("/mnt/sdcard","1.mp4"),"rw" );
                long remainingChunk = ff.length() - range; //remaining
                if (remainingChunk < constantLength){
                    bufLength= remainingChunk; //means last part
                    isLastPart = true;
                }

                else
                    bufLength = constantLength;
                if (range !=0)
                    ff.seek(range);
                buffer= new byte[(int)bufLength];


                ff.read(buffer);


            } catch (FileNotFoundException e) {
                e.printStackTrace();
                buffer = new byte[0];
            } catch (IOException e) {
                e.printStackTrace();
                buffer = new byte[0];
            }
            Response response;
//            if (isLastPart)
//                response = new Response(Response.Status.OK,"video/mp4",new ByteArrayInputStream(buffer));
//            else
                response = new Response(Response.Status.PARTIAL_CONTENT,"video/mp4",new ByteArrayInputStream(buffer));

            response.addHeader("Content-Length","891064");
            response.addHeader("Content-Range",String.format("bytes %s-%s/%s", range,(range+bufLength),"891064"));
            Log.e("SERVER","Inside server sent " + String.format("bytes %s-%s/%s", range,(range+bufLength),"891064"));
            return response;

        }
    }
}

Answer 1

Finally I found out my problem the problem wasn't with the code but the media I have used wasn't standard according to google's doc.

You can read more here : http://www.vahidhashemi.com/?p=120