After downloading and using Xuggler, my initial impressions are very good; it supports a whole host of codecs, it was relatively hassle free to get going and the getting started tutorial videos explained all the necessary concepts very clearly.
However, after playing around with it for a couple of days I'm really tearing my hair out over getting all the audio and video to sync up nicely. It's fine when playing normally but when adding pausing, seeking and accounting for occasional 6 second pauses while my external hard drive spins up it becomes an absolute nightmare.
I've partly implemented something already but it's nowhere near perfect - you can seek around a few times but after a while it still drifts off.
I can't help thinking this is a common use case of Xuggler and someone must have done this sort of thing already much better than I have. But alas, I can't find any examples beyond the ones on the website. Is there a higher level API around that manages all the audio / video sync issues and just provides some higher level controls (play, pause, stop etc.)? I've no problem going down the route of doing it myself if there's nothing out there already, but I've never been a fan of reinventing the wheel (especially if my new wheel is in all likelihood worse than the old one!)
This is really a two part answer - the first being yes, there is a higher level "player" framework here. It's in early stages but much better than anything I would have cobbled together quickly, and I'm sure the guy running it would be open to any improvements in the code.
Secondly, I didn't really go with the above at all because I looked to VLCJ instead which uses libVLC which in turn has all the synchronisation stuff built in nicely. To get multiple players embedded in the application reliably you need to use out of process players (see here for how I went about doing it) but once that framework is in place it works reliably, fast and overall very well.
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I would make an application that handle the volume buttons when screen is off. The goal would be to turn on or off the front LED.
I know that there many topics here that talk about it, but the recommended solutions (like PARTIAL_WAKE_LOCK) seem to be energy intensive and drain the battery very quickly!
What I want is a solution that is as energy efficient as possible. Is this possible? Maybe some kind of hooking?
Please note that the solutions based on scheduled tasks can not be envisaged for this project because I want detect keys in real time (or close to it)!
Take a look at this question.. if you already haven't ..
Just to make one thing clear. If something is not documented in API docs of android then any hack or workaround you find won't be reliable as Google may decide to change things in future releases, for example there is nothing documented about creating shortcuts after the app is installed ! But Since Android source code is available, developers took that piece of code as how was playstore creating shortcuts.. but its not documented so Google may change it in future !
I'm working on a musical application that relies entirely on MIDI. I want this app to be around for quite awhile, into the next many OS editions, etc. (given normal upkeep and updates, etc.)
But since Microsoft, Java/Google/Android and others are showing signs of dropping MIDI support entirely from their APIs (at least the way I see it) maybe there is a movement to kill MIDI off...?
Anyway, I'm looking for a viable alternative to MIDI with its easy real-time interactivity. I hope to stay with MIDI but if the writing is on the wall I'd rather know now than wait. If MIDI weren't available, what would you do?
But since Microsoft, Java/Google/Android and others are showing signs of dropping MIDI support entirely from their APIs (at least the way I see it) maybe there is a movement to kill MIDI off...?
Where did you get this idea? MIDI isn't going anywhere, as it's so simple and universal. If you build an app using MIDI, it's definitely not in danger of becoming obsolete for that reason.
I am creating an app that requires a sound or sounds to potentially be played every ~25ms. (300beats per minute with potentially 8 "plays" per beat)
At first I used SoundPool to accomplish this. I have 3 threads. One is updating the SurfaceView animation, one is updating the time using System.nanoTime(), and the other is playing the sounds (mp3s) using Soundpool.
This works, but seems to be using a lot of processor power as anytime a background process runs such as the WiFi rescanning, or GC, it starts skipping beats here and there, which is unacceptable.
I am looking for an alternative solution. I've looked at mixing and also the JET engine.
The JET engine doesn't seem like a solution as it only uses MIDIs. My app requires high-quality sounds (recordings from actual instruments). (correct me if I'm wrong on midi not being high quality)
Mixing seems very complicated with Android as it seems first you must get the raw sound (takes up a lot of memory) and also create "silence" in between sounds. I am not sure if this is the most elegant solution as my app will have variable speed (bpm) controlled by the user.
If anyone is experienced in this area, I would GREATLY appreciate any advice.
Thank you
Processing has Android support and it seems to be pretty awesome from my 10 minutes of playing with it. But I would like to make a regular (nongraphics) application like a twitter feed reader or something. So is there something like Processing that can do regular apps? Besides Titanium...
Basically I am looking for anything that will make coding for android easier, processing was so easy to get working that I was very happy with it, but it is for graphics only. Titanium didn't give me the same wow factor and it isn't open so that kind of takes away from it. What other tools are out there?
I'm going to give you the answer you are looking for and some advice.
Processing can do ANY of the things you are thinking about doing. If you want textboxes etc, you can use the Control P5 library. It's great. If you are an expert at Processing and just want to port over your Processing code to android, Processing for android is great.
But that's not what you want to do. You want to write an application. And you want to write it on Android. There are frameworks designed to give you a leg up in writing cross-platform mobile apps, but nothing is going to make writing an android application easier than learning Java and learning how the android stack works. It's actually really well designed and easy to follow once you start grokking "intents" and "bundles".
At the end of the day, you might even want to scale back a little further. Are you trying to write an application that needs to be used without internet access or that uses super special phone APIs? If you aren't, maybe you should try just writing your app as an html5 css3 website.
You can do plenty of input based stuff with processing. The original mouse events work as specified, except pass touches, but you can also access things like pressure and multiple fingers down. The hardware keys are also supported.
I'm writing a time management application and I have an idea for presenting timelines and todo items in 3D. Visually, I imagine this as looking down a corridor or highway in 3D, with upcoming deadlines and tasks represented as signposts - more important items are larger and upcoming deadlines are nearer.
I want to do this in Java, however I have no idea how to begin. For example, I would like to be able to render text and 2D graphics (dates, calendars etc) on the floor/walls of the corridoor, as well as on task items. The tasks themselves could be simple blocks. However examples of 3D code I have seen all look to operate on a very low level, and what I can't figure out are the appropriate co-ordinates to be using, or how the user would be able to interact with the view by selecting items with the mouse (for example clicking an expand or info button to get/edit task properties with the usual swing components).
Is there any higher level API I could be using, or example code that does this sort of thing? Any other ideas for how best to approach this problem?
edit: removed Java3D requirement - I just need to do this in Java.
To be perfectly honest, most "clever" user interfaces are ineffective for a number of reasons:
They favor complexity (for the sake of coolness) over simplicity and usability.
They are likely to be totally unfamiliar to the user.
You have to implement them yourself without some library having done the hard work for you.
I think the interface you describe runs the risk of falling into this trap. What's wrong with the current interface? Won't it be really hard to get an overview due to foreground stuff getting in the way? Now of course you could take it a step further and zoom out/rotate to get an overview but that complicates things.
Having said all that, if you can make it easy to use and really slick, then it can make an application. Users will have a lower tolerance for failure in "fancy" UIs, so perhaps this isn't the best first 3D project.
I do think there is a need for more examples geared towards visualisation rather than games.
To be honest, having tried both, if you use JOGL instead you'll find there's tonnes of OpenGL examples to copy that sort of thing from, and you won't have to code around the limits of the scene graph Java3D gives you. I tried Java3D a couple of years ago in a simple wireframe viewer, and it was such a pain to get the camera control right and the rendering anywhere near OK that I gave up on it.
I've found Pro Java 6 3D Game Development to contain very good code examples.
Here's a code example of 3D text, from NeHe Productions!, check the "DOWNLOAD Java Code" and "DOWNLOAD JoGL Code" at the end of the example.
On a side-note, I was very impressed with LWJGL which makes you write in a very similar way to straight-forward OpenGL.