Stream AAC on Android

Question

Hi all,

I'm working on an app for a client that requires streaming of an AAC audio stream. Unfortunately, there's nothing I can do about the stream format on the server. I'm working on Android and have discovered that Android's media player does not support raw AAC streams (which is what I'm getting). I found a project on Google Code that supports it (I tested it with the stream) but it's GPL'ed and that doesn't work for my client. I don't have much experience with this sort of thing so forgive me if my ideas aren't great. I know Android can play AAC encoded content if it is in an MP4 wrapper so I had thought about creating an MP4 wrapper on the fly on the client-side or perhaps even just doing some conversion to another format on the fly. Are these reasonable options? Does anybody have better suggestions?

Thanks in advance!

Edit To rephrase, is it possible to put a raw AAC stream from a web server in an MP4 container in real time? If so, does anybody know of resources to help me with the process?

Answer 1

I'm wondering if you ever came up with a solution for this problem? I'm in a similar situation. We have a web service generating AAC files, though not raw, they have the ADTS header. Android 2.2 can't play these files, though android 2.1 can, oddly enough. It seems to be a problem rooted to android switching to stagefright libraries for media playback in 2.2.

The AAC files do play fine when wrapped in an MP4 container. We've accomplish this on the server side very easily using FAAC (I realize this doesn't help you in your situation). We are still investigating licensing issues with using an mp4 container though. Does this require royalties?

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To answer my own question...a lawyer has confirmed that using an mp4 container for an AAC file does not require licensing.