Question

I’ve got an Android project I’m working on that, ultimately, will require me to create a movie file out of a series of still images taken with a phone’s camera. That is to say, I want to be able to take raw image frames and string them together, one by one, into a movie. Audio is not a concern at this stage.

Looking over the Android API, it looks like there are calls in it to create movie files, but it seems those are entirely geared around making a live recording from the camera on an immediate basis. While nice, I can’t use that for my purposes, as I need to put annotations and other post-production things on the images as they come in before they get fed into a movie (plus, the images come way too slowly to do a live recording). Worse, looking over the Android source, it looks like a non-trivial task to rewire that to do what I want it to do (at least without touching the NDK).

Is there any way I can use the API to do something like this? Or alternatively, what would be the best way to go about this, if it’s even feasible on cell phone hardware (which seems to keep getting more and more powerful, strangely…)?

Answer 1

Is there any way I can use the API to
do something like this?

No.

Or alternatively, what would be the
best way to go about this, if it’s
even feasible on cell phone hardware
(which seems to keep getting more and
more powerful, strangely…)?

It is possible you can find a Java library that lets you assemble movies out of stills and annotations, but I would be rather surprised if it met your needs, would run on Android, and would run acceptably on mobile phone hardware.

IMHO, the best route is to use a Web service. Use the device for data collection, use the server to do all the heavy lifting of assembling the movie out of the parts.

If you have to do it on-device, the NDK seems like the only practical route.