Using IOMX from jni to gain access to hardware codecs

[Luca Piccarreta]

Hi all,
I've recently discovered that mediaplayerservice exposes a nice interface IOMX

http://android.git.kernel.org/?p=platform/frameworks/base.git;a=blob;f=include/media/IOMX.h;h=10e0197b6b9440ee692eeff8c0ddc2325730baed;hb=9f9afef3d5da3be6812192e60797b1c035445c3c

This is exactly what I was looking for, a way to use hardware codecs in an application with no root access.

Unfortunately, I was not able to build a fully working application. Codec enumeration / Initialization / decoding
are performed correctly, but when I try to deallocate the IOMX node, I get a segmentation fault.
It is not easy to find the cause, as unfortunately I have no debug symbols for the tablet shared libraries

Did anyone experiment with this?

Thanks in advance,
Luca.

[ssocco]

Hi Luca,

I'm interested in iOMX access from JNI as well. Did you ever make progress on this topic?

Thanks

[Glenn Kasten]

APIs for lower-level access to platform media codecs is an often-requested feature. As such, it's on the long-term roadmap, but I can't commit to a specific release or date.

In the mean time, I don't recommend using internal APIs such as you mentioned -- they will almost certainly break in every release, may be incompatible between devices, etc.  A safer workaround would be to use open source software codecs with a suitable license. I realize this doesn't solve your request for hardware-accelerated codecs though.

[Glenn Kasten]

FYI starting with Android 4.1 (API level 16 / Jellybean) see http://developer.android.com/reference/android/media/MediaCodec.html

This uses hardware acceleration where appropriate.

[steve]

Dam!, this trashed all of my OpenMAX knowledge.