What is the difference between MediaPlayer and VideoView in Android

android streaming android-mediaplayer android-videoview
oattie picture oattie · Nov 4, 2010 · Viewed 40k times · Source

I was wondering if there's a difference between them when it comes to streaming videos.

I know VideoView can be used for streaming and what is Mediaplayer for? As far as I know, MediaPlayer can do the same thing as VideoView right?

Can anyone give me the answer?

And if I want to stream video from the server by using RTSP to Android, which one should I start with? VideoView or MediaPlayer?

Any suggestion?

Answer

mishkin picture mishkin · Jan 19, 2011

Was asking the same question and as I understood from what Mark (CommonsWare) advised on numerous threads here, VideoView is a wrapper (200 hundred lines of code) for MediaPlayer and SurfaceView to provide embedded controls.

He also kindly shared some examples:

https://github.com/commonsguy/cw-advandroid/blob/master/Media/Video/src/com/commonsware/android/video/VideoDemo.java

https://github.com/commonsguy/vidtry/blob/master/src/com/commonsware/android/vidtry/Player.java

and example from android sdk http://developer.android.com/resources/samples/ApiDemos/src/com/example/android/apis/media/MediaPlayerDemo.html

Also some people had issues playing video on emulator, so make sure to test it on actual device if you have issues

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