How to play a video from Amazon S3 in Android App?

Question

I use aws-android-sdk-1.4.3/samples/S3_SimpleDB_SNS_SQS_Demo to preview my files stored on Amazon (Amazon Simple Storage Service). Looking through code I saw that they use this, to acces the files:

com.amazonaws.demo.s3.S3.getDataForObject (line 130)

 public static String getDataForObject( String bucketName, String objectName ) {
        return read( getInstance().getObject( bucketName, objectName ).getObjectContent() );
    }


protected static String read( InputStream stream ) {
    try {
        ByteArrayOutputStream baos = new ByteArrayOutputStream( 8196 );
        byte[] buffer = new byte[1024];
        int length = 0;
        while ( ( length = stream.read( buffer ) ) > 0 ) {
            baos.write( buffer, 0, length );
        }

        return baos.toString();
    }
    catch ( Exception exception ) {
        return exception.getMessage();

    }
}

}

Well, I have modified this methods to return ByteArrayOutputStream instead then I easily transform it to String or Bitmap (applying ByteArrayOutputStream.toByteArray() then using BitmapFactory.decodeByteArray(byte[] data, int offset, int length, Options opts)).

So, it works on text-files and pictures. My problem is when I try to access videos. So, my questions are:

1.Using the method provided above, how could I get a video from ByteArrayOutputStream (ByteArrayOutputStream.toString()) and play it in a VideoView or using MediaPlayer or an approach... ?

2 . Does anybody know any other solution to this problem of preview videos stored on Amazon ? (I heard that on their sdk for IOS they use URLs to access files...)

PS: Supplying the file URL and open it in browser does not make sense, because this URLs expire after a wile.

Answer 1

First we have to provide the name of our bucket and the object (see aws-android-sdk-1.4.3/samples/S3_SimpleDB_SNS_SQS_Demo for a complet guide) we want to open then get the URL to our object:

    AWSCredentials myCredentials = new BasicAWSCredentials("YOUR_AMAZON_ACCESS_KEY_ID", "YOUR_AMAZON_SECRET_KEY_ID");
    AmazonS3 s3client = new AmazonS3Client(myCredentials);
    GeneratePresignedUrlRequest request = new GeneratePresignedUrlRequest(bucketName, objectName);
    URL objectURL = s3client.generatePresignedUrl(request);

Now, just play the video in a video view, supplying the URL obtained:

    getWindow().setFormat(PixelFormat.TRANSLUCENT);
    mediaCtrl = new MediaController(this);
    mediaCtrl.setMediaPlayer(videoView);
    videoView.setMediaController(mediaCtrl);
    Uri clip = Uri.parse(objectURL.toString());
    videoView.setVideoURI(clip);
    videoView.requestFocus();
    videoView.start();

I want to give thanks to @CommonsWare for

• indicating me through REST API (even the code I used is from aws-sdk reading the REST API documentation helped me and show also other ways of requesting Amazon objects)

• indicating me to use generatePresignedUrl()

• the code for playing the video is also inspired from his materials.