Mobile devices have evolved to focus on rich media production and consumption. Developers of mobile applications are able to create applications that allow people to play, capture, and share media in a variety of new ways on mobile devices. The popularity of Android has soared in part because the platform offers developers a rich set of capabilities including access to media capturing and playback functions.   

Pro Android Media provides concise and clear instruction on how to utilize the media APIs made available through Android to create dynamic apps. It takes you from a simple means to gain access to the camera to complex video capture and sharing examples. It also covers sound, graphics, painting, and moreeverything you need to make your app come "alive."

After reading this book, the app you create will showcase the best of multimedia that Android has to offer.

What youll learn

• Develop graphics, music, video and rich media apps for Android smartphones and tablets 
• Build touchscreen input features into Android apps that allow users to draw, paint, and do other creative forms of input.
• Turn the Android smartphone into a full fledged media player
• How to integrate and use location based services and media related web service APIs

Who this book is for


This book is aimed primarily at the growing market of Android developers. It is written in such a way that it may be used by those who are familiar with Android, but have no experience developing applications that deal with images, audio, or video.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction to Android Imaging
2. Building Custom Camera Applications
3. Image Editing and Processing
4. Graphics and Touch Events
5. Introduction to Audio on Android
6. Background and Networked Audio
7. Audio Capture
8. Audio Synthesis and Analysis
9. Introduction to Video
10. Advanced Video
11. Video Capture
12. Media Consumption and Publishing Using Web Services

Customer Reviews & Comments
I enjoyed reading through Pro Android Media. The book gives you a good understanding of the media capabilities of the Android platform, covering images, audio, and video. Web services, from the point of view of media consumption and publishing, are also explained. Each media section starts out by explaining how to display the media using the built-in Android applications or your own custom Views, and then proceeds to cover advanced concepts such as browsing or streaming the media. Additionally, each section covers how to capture the media and potentially edit it on the device. Pro Android Media assumes a basic knowledge of Android programming, though it makes sure to touch on the basics of a concept (intents, activities, etc.) the first time it is introduced. The first 3 chapters cover Images: displaying, capturing and editing. Chapter 1 uses the built-in camera intent to capture an image. In doing so, the chapter refreshes on some of the basics of Android programming (intents, content providers, URIs, etc.), in a way that provides a friendly refresher to the novice Android programmer but doesn't take up much of the chapter. Chapter 2 has you build a camera application for more flexibility, such as time-delayed photography. It covers capturing and saving images, both internally and to the SD card. Chapter 3 delves into image editing and browsing. This includes scaling, rotating, mirroring, flipping, color corrections, etc. It doesn't necessarily cover the math behind the concepts (though links to appropriate Wikipedia pages), but introduces you to the APIs you would use for various image editing tasks. Chapter 4 covers Graphics: How to deal with raw Bitmaps and drawing concepts such as using the Canvas for shapes, lines and text. Chapters 5 - 8 cover Audio: playback, background audio and network streaming, capturing, and synthesis/analysis. There are examples showing how you can retrieve, store and query the metadata of media on the device. Audio recording can be done via three separate (and increasingly complex, though more flexible) interfaces, and the book gives examples of each and why you'd need to use one over the other. In Chapter 8, you build a DJ scratching interface using the touch screen, as well as an audio visualizer (FFT). One great inclusion is the state diagrams for the MediaPlayer and MediaRecorder. These interfaces aren't extremely complex, but having the diagrams helps you get a good feel for the interface. Chapters 9 - 11 cover Video: playback, browsing and streaming, and capture. Chapter 10 covers advanced video concepts such as streaming video from the internet and gives an example of playing from YouTube's servers. The video chapters are finished off by covering video capture, and there are good (though brief) explanations of the capture profiles, codecs, settings and encoders you can use. Chapter 12 finishes the book and covers media consumption and publishing using Web Services. It felt a little out of place initially (this chapter's concepts are likely covered in most general Android books), but I was thankful that they included it as it is a great compressed summary of what interfaces you might need if you want to interact the web. It gives examples of how you'd use JSON, REST and XML web services, as well as how you can incorporate the user's geolocation in your API calls. There are examples of how to interact with Flickr and Blip.TV, both consuming/browsing media and uploading content to them. The overall writing style is easy to read and to the point. The example code is solid and well explained, often inline, which helps with understanding. It's not a long book, nor does it need to be. The book is great for someone who has been tasked to implement some specific interaction with media in their Android app, yet doesn't know the right approach or interfaces to use yet.

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