The VideoLAN Forums

Hi,

I'm starting a funding website for the development of VLC to Android. I was asking myself how much do we need to accumulate for your to start working on this? I was able to gather $300 in donations from android and google g1 communities all around the net but I need to know how much you guys are looking for? Is it like around $1,000 or more in the $10,000?

Please let me know, it's the last info I need before launching the website.

Thanks

Well, it could cost a lot, but it could cost nothing...

In fact, now, Android is Java Only, so this is not usefull yet. However, when the native SDK is opened, it would "just" need a SDK, a test machine and some time.
VLC works more or less on many other ARM machines, so no reasons that it wouldn't work too.

Have you looked at openmoko plateform ?

About android i am pretty sure a JNI like interface will apprear some day
--
http://rzr.online.fr/q/android

Any more news on this matter?

I guess, there is now a local SDK.
It would be maybe around 6k$.

Well, the local SDK misses any kind of API for video or audio output, so I don't really see how a port is going to happen...

So us android users are pretty much screwed from getting a good videoplayer then?

With the current SDK, yes. It only supports the delegation of high performance tasks from Java apps to C, but that's it. This is not sufficient to port VLC, an app written in C/C++ only.
If Google releases a more complete SDK, it might be able to port VLC to Android similar to way VLC could be ported to the iPhone.

I am interested to porting VLC to android.
Yes, google SDK only have a limited support JNI.
But if you download the full android source from android main site, the tool chain in already there.
There is a project to port snes emulator on android, I tried it and seems it works fine on G1.(as well as our phone in development)
http://code.google.com/p/androidsnes/
Google also have a demo code to port Doom.

That would be great Seast! Please keep us posted, you have twitter or something? I am also still missing a good video player for Android, and on the pc I'm so spoiled with VLC.

That would be most welcomed.

I am interested to porting VLC to android.
Yes, google SDK only have a limited support JNI.
But if you download the full android source from android main site, the tool chain in already there.

The toolchain is a small piece in a big puzzle. Getting an ARM Linux toolchain is not difficult. If you don't want to compile it yourself, you can download one from CodeSourcery.

There are much bigger problems:

• A proper video output driver. Android does not use X11 (does it?), so you will need to access the frame buffer or the GPU directly, and cooperate with the rest of the (Java) operating system. This had better support rescaling and YCrCb color space in hardware, otherwise you can forget about decoding video at more than 1 frame per second.
• An audio output driver. VLC needs to output PCM audio samples with very low latency, and cooperate with the operating system, so that say incoming voice calls are not muted while VLC is playing back.
• A user interface. That might be doable in Java but it is quite a lot of work in any case (the official VLC Qt4 and MacOS interfaces represent 20000 lines each).
• Adequate CPU power, or CPU-specific optimizations, or DSP support for video decoding.
• A decent run-time C library, or a set of stubs for all missing functions.
  .

This is not to say that VLC on Android NDK is not feasible, but it is probably not as obvious thing to do as it may seem.

N.B.: For the sake of full disclosure, I mention that I am currently working for a direct competitor to Android.

I read a message online about the new Mozilla browser for mobiles (Fennec is written in C/C++).
It seems that Androids Native development kit (NDK) uses C/C++

So I guess it's possible to run a vlc runtime library on Android.

But hey, I'm not a programmer.