in short: i have some audio files in my local sqlitedatabse and want to play with with the native media player from android.
reffered to the documentation i can play an audio either by placing my audio file on the sd card or by streaming from server or by an URI.
There is no way to play an audio file by giving an byte array to the media player.
so my solution would be to build an CONTENTPROVIDER which lets my media player access the audio file in the database via an URI. I came up with that idea through this tutorial
http://www.vogella.com/articles/AndroidSQLite/article.html
Is this possible? Are there better ways to implement my issue?
If I understand your question correctly, you are proposing creating an artificial URL that you are then passing to the android system to be read, and you supply the data backing the URL by reading it from SQLite. That will probably work, and it solves some issues with content decoding, but it requires the creation of awkward URLs and sockets within the system. All that might not be the most reliable or efficient way to go.
The alternative is to decode the data yourself into PCM, and supply it to Android via an Audio Track. This would be superior because you aren't trying to create a hacked (and artificial) URL just to pipe a stream of data through, but it may require you to parse the data yourself and convert it to PCM. Depending on what formats you have in your database, this may be difficult and not worth it because Android libraries for these kinds of conversions are not as accessible. So, which way is best depends on your goals, but I think those are your two options.
I have a couple issues with it:
media fails to play and continues to fail until the application is restarted
audio plays normally but video is in slow-motion and will not play normally until the application is restarted.
there's no way to reinitialize other than an app restart. (that I know of)
there's no real solid way to know if a video is rendering. I can observe Position to verify it is playing but it's not a guarantee there's any video output.
I run two instances of an extended version of MediaElement in my WPF app which hinges on their stability. After many tests I've concluded that it's the highest performing video player out there, above MediaKit and vlcdotnet, due to using solely GPU to decode. I've encoded videos in WVC1 (Windows Media Video AP#l3 VC-1) for 1080p quality and relatively small file sizes. Eventually after several plays the videos will fail to play, at which point the MediaFailed event is fired and subsequently stops working altogether until the application is restarted.
It is my understanding that when it fails like this, it's a core failure within the underlying Windows Media Player OCX control and it cannot be fixed in any way other than a full application restart. Has anybody found any reliable workarounds for these issues? Mum's the word over at the Microsoft forums...
Answering my own question here to possibly facilitate future SO'ers who might run into these issues. The issue lies in WPF, it is not planned to be improved. For a more reliable solution with minimal overhead, try WPFMediaKit.
Does anyone know of a Silverlight Video player that permits "seeking" to a particular offset of the stream without having to download the whole thing?
I'm a bit new to this Silverlight gig, so will appreciate anything you can point me to to get me up to speed.
I come from a flash background, but I think this may apply to silverlight too.
Generally speaking, It's not the player that determines whether you can jump to a point in video but how the video is delivered.
Generally speaking - If you are downloading the video progressively over http, you will have to wait until the section of the video you want to skip to has been downloaded before you can jump to it. This is not always the case, YouTube, for example serve their content progressively. Also, this guy came up with another solution - http://www.flashcomguru.com/index.cfm/2005/11/2/Streaming-flv-video-via-PHP-take-two You may be able to find a similar workaround using dot net rather than php.
An easier way to achieve your goal, although not as cheap, would be to use a streaming server. You can use specific severs to allow actual video streaming, where you will be able to jump to various points in the video. I've found wowza quite good - http://www.wowzamedia.com/ Or to use a service like limelight or streamzilla. However they can be very very expensive.
Suppose there is a Silverlight streaming video player on a random web site. How can I intercept the video stream and for example save it to file - i.e. the real source of the file.
I know some of the sites embed the source in tag - or at least that was the case with Flash. But sometimes, players are smarter than that and call some logic via web service. It is still possible to figure everything out by analyzing the .dll with reflector, but that is hardcore! Every player may have a different logic, so I figured out it would be easier to just get the current stream somehow.
Any thoughts?
Ooook! Got me an answer that could be used as a nice workaround. With the use of fiddler I was able to capture the traffic and figure out what's going on. Now I'm happily watchin the same video as before only using the uber feature of WMP that lets me play videos faster.
I'm communicating with a logic analyzer (HP 1660A) over RS232. I issue a command which tells the analyzer to print screen its display and send it over to the controller (my pc) through serial communication. I'm saving the result (which is usually abut 25kB) to my computer and I would like to view it as a TIFF or other format. The problem is that the response from the analyzer comes in PCL format, therefore suitable to be sent to a printer and printed directly, but not to be opened as an image. I have tried a few PCL to image converters to do the job, I found one which does it properly, however I've used the trial version and I am reluctant to purchase it. I've given you the background of my labour. I would appreciate any kind of help, a reference to the commands in pcl 1 and what should I do in order to extract the data and format it properly from the PCL file. I have no experience with PCL and image processing whatsoever, so please, give me a hand here. Thank you.
P.S. I've obtained the PCL file from the analyzer, both in C# and matlab... I have one slight problem in C# with the serial port control, some images have some uninterpreted characters in the image, when using the above converters. I say all these because I need an algorithm or some indications, no matter the programming language, so please feel free to post.
PCL is complex to read. There are only a handful of tools out there that do a good job of this. We have lots of PCL expertise and still often look to other to supply conversion to PDF and other formats. If the PCL is quite simple, that is, just text, a few fonts, and a graphic or two, a couple of RegEx commands could deal with the extraction of the text and then you could mock up a new document using whatever tools you wish.
Looking at these files in stackoverflow might be tough. If you can get them on an ftp and post a link I can take a quick look and post my findings/thoughts here. The other option is to look to an outside tool. There are a few we've had success with. Our needs are broad so I've settled on one that works the best with many different PCL streams (some PCL coding is better than others). As you are dealing with a known quantity of PCL you may have a few options. Here are a few we've used and had some success with (in order of usefulness to us)
PCLWorks by PageTech (they have a GUI viewer and complete SDK)
VeryPDF PCL Converter (command line tool)
SwiftView
There are others, and even an opensource variant of Ghostscript that handles PCL (we've never had much luck as the PCL we use often contains very custom fonts, symbol sets, and tons of macros which seem to choke it.
GhostPCL
EDIT: Most recently we've been working with LincPDF (http://www.lincolnco.com/). This is also an excellent product with has one big benefit, deployment is simple. Some of the other tools have complex software installations. This solution is very easy for us to deploy as a feature in an application. It's also faster then any tools we've tested to date (at least with the PCL that we generate from our apps which is quite complex as they include specialized fonts and macros).
According to the spec sheet for the HP 1660 (pdf) series can send the TIFF,PCX and postscript.
Wouldn't it be easier to use TIFF?
The project was put on hold for a while, but I would like to offer a complete and usable solution.
#Adrian
You can save the image to a floppy disk, I've done that, saved it as TIFF and everything worked fine. Unfortunately, it sends only PCL through RS232. The idea to save the print screen over serial communication was to avoid using too much the floppy disk, which the device uses in order to boot.
#Douglas
Thank you for your elaborate answer. I'll take a look at the indicated tools, however, my desire is to offer a complete front-end solution, which yields directly the graphic. I've put some files from my tests here in order to see the complexity of the PCL constructions. Do you have any knowledge of a possible API that I could integrate into my application, which can parse the file and interpret the PCL?
Regards,
Cosmin
We capture the serial input via a serial spooler that watches COM1:. It's called SSpool.exe. It redirects the PCL as input to PCLXForm. PCLXForm converts it into any raster format (TIFF, JPG, PDF, BMP, etc.) However, we can also extract the text during the conversion and we can extract individual raster objects from the PCL for re-arrangement in the downstream application. Our pricing model is positioned for licensee's that need to convert up to 50,000 pages of invoices into indexed PDF's per month. However, this type of application normally requires a custom license in order to get our pricing down to the level required. In order to do so, we often have to restrict our product to convert unlimited files, but only up to the 20th page within any one PCL print file. That provides enough page volume and gives us the ability to reduce the pricing per unit. To demo, you would need the PCLTool SDK.