Processing Frames from Mediacodec Output and Update the Frames on Android

Question

I am doing a project on image processing stuff. I receive a raw h264 video stream in real time and decode it using MediaCodec. I have successfully displayed the decoded video on a TextureView or SurfaceView. Now I want to process each frame, do something to it using OpenCV4Android and show the updated video frame on the screen. I know OpenCV has a sample project that demonstrates how to process video frames from the phone camera, but I wonder how to do it if I have another video source.

Also I have some questions on TextureView:

1. What does the onSurfaceTextureUpdated() from SurfaceTextureListener do? If I call getBitmap() in this function, then does that mean I get each frame of the video? And what about SurfaceTexture.onFrameAvailableListener?

2. Is it possible to use a hidden TextureView as an intermediate, extract its frames for processing and render it back to another surface, say, OpenGL ES texture for displaying?

Answer 1

The various examples in Grafika that use Camera as input can also work with input from a video stream. Either way you send the video frame to a Surface.

If you want to work with a frame of video in software, rather than on the GPU, things get more difficult. You either have to receive the frame on a Surface and copy it to a memory buffer, probably performing an RGB-to-YUV color conversion in the process, or you have to get the YUV buffer output from MediaCodec. The latter is tricky because a few different formats are possible, including Qualcomm's proprietary tiled format.

With regard to TextureView:

1. onSurfaceTextureUpdated() is called whenever TextureView receives a new frame. You can use getBitmap() to get every frame of the video, but you need to pace the video playback to match your filter speed -- TextureView will drop frames if you fall behind.

2. You could create a "hidden TextureView" by putting other View elements on top of it, but that would be silly. TextureView uses a SurfaceTexture to convert the video frames to OpenGL ES textures, then renders them as part of drawing the View UI. The bitmap data is retrieved with glReadPixels(). You can just use these elements directly. The bigflake ExtractMpegFramesTest demonstrates this.