Another month and another strong release of the VMIX Mobile Video SDK, chock-full of features we hope will save you time deploying your mobile applications.
This month, we decided to focus on bringing parity to the Android side of things, and to solve a challenge many developers that we’ve talked to are facing: video quality vs. streaming.
Android Video Upload
Last month, we introduced capabilities for our iOS SDK that make it easy to allow iPhone users to capture and upload videos directly from their phones to your media libraries. This month, we ported that same functionality over to our Android SDK.
While we weren’t able to squeeze in some of the niceties, like upload-progress bars, the core functionality is there. We’ve seen a lot of interest in Android development over the months and, while many of you have deployed an iOS application or two, you’ve been stumped when it comes to porting your apps over to Android.
This month, we felt your pain by walking in your shoes! The devices out there running Android are varied and come in different sizes, resolutions and versions of the software. And those versions tripped us up in a few spots. Specifically, we ran into instability when rotating our demo application in Android 2.2 (Froyo). The solution to these issues was simple: lock the device in portrait mode. While this isn’t the ideal solution, it did allow us to get a much more stable product out for this month and stay on schedule. Application rotation is important in some contexts, but for many (likely, most) applications, users will be content to use the application in portrait mode.
Do I Choose Quality or File Size? The Answer? You Can Have Both!
For the second piece of this release, we tackled a persistent challenge developers face: finding a middle ground between quality and small file size for mobile video delivery.
With Apple and AT&T setting strict standards for how much data can go over the cellular network (and the speculation that other carriers will likely follow AT&T’s lead) developers are fretting a lot more about how to conform to manufacturer and carrier requirements so that their apps are not yanked from stores or censured in any way.
To solve this, we employed the same KISS strategy we did with the Android rotation issues. Our solution is to serve different quality video formats depending on the type of data network the device is using at time of play.
VMIX can encode to a wide variety of bitrates, dimensions and formats without breaking a sweat. And the SDK now includes two format IDs in the configuration files (for both iOS and Android).
So when a device is using a Wi-Fi network at time of play, we serve a higher-quality file; if the device only has cellular network connectivity, we serve an appropriate, lower-end format.
Benefits? Two biggies:
- Mobile users are guaranteed to get the best playback experience for their connection.
- And developers can be sure their applications will use Wi-Fi whenever possible. At the same time, developers can stop worrying about consuming too much bandwidth when their apps play video on cellular networks.
If your account isn’t already set up to encode to different formats, let your Client Services Manager know and they’ll help you set this up. Once your account is set to encode a couple different formats, your app built on the VMIX SDK will automatically switch users to a lower-quality video as they move from Wi-Fi to the cell network.
And, of course, it goes without saying that our powerful encoders still keep that lower-quality video very watchable!
To find out more about the latest version
of our SDK, read on.
