Android HTTPS Progressive Streaming in Honeycomb 3.1 3.2

Question

According to this page: http://developer.android.com/guide/appendix/media-formats.html

Android 3.1 and 3.2 should support HTTPS progressive streaming, but I am having a hard time finding out how to do so because setDataSource for MediaPlayer only takes http/rtsp. Is there a workaround to stream HTTPS content?

Answer 1

Since you tagged your question #google-tv, I can say for certain that on #google-TV, https does not work for HLS on the current and last several versions.

If you'd like to secure your content, send a cookie with the initial key, then use AES w/ rotating keys for your segments. To set the initial cookie for verification, you'll need to use reflection to set your cookies in a videoView.

Answer 2

First of all, Honeycomb is closed-source and released under NDA. Hence, it may not be possible to discuss Honeycomb's sources in a public forum due to legal restrictions.

However, the subsequent AOSP release i.e. Ice-cream Sandwich a.k.a. ICS has derived a lot of features from Honeycomb and hence, I am phrasing my answer based on the same.

From MediaPlayer.java sources, I do agree with your observation on support for http or rtsp only as observed from here. However, from the player engine implementation, we can observe that https is also supported as can be observed from AwesomePlayer::finishSetDataSource. I presume you would have considered the intent related dependencies for http download already.

<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.INTERNET" >
</uses-permission>

In a nutshell, I feel https may already be supported by the platform.