I’m curious if someone can point me to (or just describe) how, given that an Android application has an extremely limited memory space to play with (I think it’s around 20 megs), a video player can load and play videos that are an order of magnitude or more larger in size. Is the app loading the video in some sort of chunks?
I ask because I have an app that has some video assets embedded and the app has grown to be about 80 megs and is just a total monster for compiling and debugging (without the assets the app would only be about 2 megs), and I was thinking that I should just remove the assets and have them download on the side and sit on the sdcard, rather than within the apk, but I’m worried that loading them and playing them at run time will bust through the app’s memory allotment, and was hoping someone can shed some light on what my options are.
TIA
They buffer the video in manageable chunks, yes. Even if your videos are GBs in size, you won’t hit a memory wall using standard video playing APIs. You can use the standard calls to
setVideoURIorsetVideoPathto point to the file and it will handle it from there. The same works forMediaPlayerin general if you’re not using aVideoViewDownloading the videos outside the apk is still a good idea, though. If I had to download a new 80MB file for each incremental upgrade, I’d probably just uninstall instead. If you don’t want to host them yourself, look into the supplemental apk option.