Current status of Stagefright

• Local file playback (AMR/MP3/MP4/...) and basic http playback support;
• Video only recording;
• A corresponding metadata retriever, not fully implemented yet.

Some thoughts on the enhancement:

• No abstraction layer for media sink, and lack of a pluggable mechanism to pick decoder dynamically based on the source's format and sink's capability. The overall architecture doesn't seem to be flexible enough to date;
• It's good to re-use the same MediaExtractor from player engine for metadata retrieving to avoid duplication. However, MediaExtractor itself might not get all required keys reliably, e.g. it might be more accurate to get some keys (e.g, video height/width) from decoder's output;
• To support audio only and audio+video recording;
• Http support is not complete, no BUFFERING status update, not asynchronous message for data insufficient/available;
• No RTSP support yet.

Anyway, it's still under active development and it's from Google, so it wouldn't be surprising that it evolves quickly as a replacement of OpenCORE in the near future;)

An overview of Stagefright player

There is a new playback engine implemented by Google comes with Android 2.0 (i.e, Stagefright), which seems to be quite simple and straightforward compared with the OpenCORE solution.

• MediaExtractor is responsible for retrieving track data and the corresponding meta data from the underlying file system or http stream;
• Leveraging OMX for decoding: there are two OMX plugins currently, adapting to PV's software codec and vendor's hardware implementation respectively. And there is a local implementation of software codecs which encapsulates PV's decoder APIs directly;
• AudioPlayer is responsible for rendering audio, it also provides the timebase for timing and A/V synchronization whenever audio track is present;
• Depending on which codec is picked, a local or remote render will be created for video rendering; and system clock is used as the timebase for video only playback;
• AwesomePlayer works as the engine to coordinate the above modules, and is finally connected into android media framework through the adapter of StagefrightPlayer.