Streaming Audio from A URL in Android using MediaPlayer?

Question

I\'ve been trying to stream mp3\'s over http using Android\'s built in MediaPlayer class. The documentation would suggest to me that this should be as easy as :

Answer 1

Android MediaPlayer doesn't support streaming of MP3 natively until 2.2. In older versions of the OS it appears to only stream 3GP natively. You can try the pocketjourney code, although it's old (there's a new version here) and I had trouble making it sticky — it would stutter whenever it refilled the buffer.

The NPR News app for Android is open source and uses a local proxy server to handle MP3 streaming in versions of the OS before 2.2. You can see the relevant code in lines 199-216 (r94) here: http://code.google.com/p/npr-android-app/source/browse/Npr/src/org/npr/android/news/PlaybackService.java?r=7cf2352b5c3c0fbcdc18a5a8c67d836577e7e8e3

And this is the StreamProxy class: http://code.google.com/p/npr-android-app/source/browse/Npr/src/org/npr/android/news/StreamProxy.java?r=e4984187f45c39a54ea6c88f71197762dbe10e72

The NPR app is also still getting the "error (-38, 0)" sometimes while streaming. This may be a threading issue or a network change issue. Check the issue tracker for updates.