TC4A's TCMP doesn't play video on some devices. Are there other players using Android MediaPlayer control?
Posted: 2020-08-15, 11:04 UTC
On some devices, TC Media Player only plays audio for video files (with extensions like .mp4).
TC's debug logs I sent on this probem in 2018 didn't help to find the reason, so for now Chrisian Ghisler's guess that it's probably codecs problem (though he also adviced to try using Android's logcat to get more details about Android MediaPlayer behavior, but I don't know how to use it, and is it even possible on phone itself without USB debug connection to PC).
However, since Android built-in player and web browsers play MP4 files on same devices fine, there is a chance that a problem may be a way in which TC Media Player uses Android MediaPlayer class.
To check it, it would be nice to try other players (compatible with Android 4.x+) which also use Android MediaPlayer interface.
However, so far I only found 1 such player distributed as compiled app (via APK file), but it's a sample project which only can play 1 file with .mp3 extension (if it is located at specified path with name mentioned in article about app, but even with this conditon it works on Android 4.3.1, but doesn't seem to work on Android 4.4 or newer; the links to project source and APK are also there), so it can't show video. Other projects I found only available as source code, and most of them are also only play audio files.
TC's debug logs I sent on this probem in 2018 didn't help to find the reason, so for now Chrisian Ghisler's guess that it's probably codecs problem (though he also adviced to try using Android's logcat to get more details about Android MediaPlayer behavior, but I don't know how to use it, and is it even possible on phone itself without USB debug connection to PC).
However, since Android built-in player and web browsers play MP4 files on same devices fine, there is a chance that a problem may be a way in which TC Media Player uses Android MediaPlayer class.
To check it, it would be nice to try other players (compatible with Android 4.x+) which also use Android MediaPlayer interface.
However, so far I only found 1 such player distributed as compiled app (via APK file), but it's a sample project which only can play 1 file with .mp3 extension (if it is located at specified path with name mentioned in article about app, but even with this conditon it works on Android 4.3.1, but doesn't seem to work on Android 4.4 or newer; the links to project source and APK are also there), so it can't show video. Other projects I found only available as source code, and most of them are also only play audio files.