extract list of available media codes

[pps]

How can I know what media codecs are available on a device?
There are a few bits of code how to access stagefright but I don't see anything about getting list of available codecs.

there is also stagefright executable that can be run from adb shell, but it seems that it lists only hardware codecs, am I right about that?
There is MediaCodecList java api, is it reliable? The problem is that I need similar functionality for lower api as well.

thanks