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Kickflip Android SDK

This document provides a more in-depth look at the Kickflip Android SDK for those wishing to modify it.

Ready to Develop with the Kickflip SDK? See the kickflip-android-sdk project for QuickStart and Build instructions if you're ready to start developing.

What is the Kickflip Android SDK?

We designed the Kickflip Android SDK to make cloud video applications for Android a joy. When paired with a Kickflip.io account this SDK can manage all the plumbing for your cloud video application: It broadcasts live HD HTTP-HLS video, manages user profiles, and allows you to query broadcasts made by your users.

See the Kickflip Example Android App for a basic live video social network written with this SDK.

Beyond a Kickflip.io client, this SDK is a collection of modular audio and video components that enable powerful hardware-accelerated video products for the Android platform. At the top level, you can use this SDK and a Kickflip account to create a live video social network without having to worry about video encoding or storage. With the lower-level classes you could create a unique kind of camera with realtime OpenGL shaders.

Setting up

Before you use the Kickflip API, you must first get your access tokens from the Kickflip dashboard.

Get the SDK

See the kickflip-android-sdk quickstart guide.

Architecture

Kickflip

Kickflip is the top-level class for easy interaction with the SDK features.

The first thing you'll do is register your application with Kickflip:

	Kickflip.setup(this, CLIENT_ID, CLIENT_SECRET);

This method returns a KickflipApiClient ready to perform API actions on behalf of your account.

	KickflipApiClient apiClient = Kickflip.setup(this, CLIENT_ID, CLIENT_SECRET);

To start broadcasting video:

	Kickflip.setup(this, CLIENT_ID, CLIENT_SECRET);
	Kickflip.startBroadcastActivity(this, new BroadcastListener() {
        @Override
        public void onBroadcastStart() {
        
        }

        @Override
        public void onBroadcastLive(String watchUrl) { 
        	Log.i("Kickflip", "This phone is live at " + watchUrl);       
        }

        @Override
        public void onBroadcastStop() {
        
        }

        @Override
        public void onBroadcastError() {
        
        }
    });
	```
	
To play a Kickflip broadcast within your app:

```java
	Kickflip.setup(this, "CLIENT_ID, CLIENT_SECRET);
	Kickflip.startMediaPlayerActivity(this, "http://example.com/stream.m3u8");

You can obtain a Kickflip Stream raw media url with stream.getStreamUrl(). For an HLS broadcast this is a url of form https://xxx.xxx/xxx.m3u8

Activities and Fragments

BroadcastActivity hosts a single BroadcastFragment which manages every aspect of the broadcasting use-case for you. BroadcastFragment take care of passing Activity lifecycle hooks to the underlying classes and is a great reference if you decide to directly interface with the base classes.

Recording (The Full Stack)

Broadcaster and AVRecorder are the high-level recording classes with APIs that are limited to starting, stopping, and a few other configuration methods. Think of AVRecorder as a supercharged version of Android's MediaRecorder. Broadcaster extends AVRecorder and handles streaming to your Kickflip account transparently.

Encoding

CameraEncoder and MicrophoneEncoder abstract the management of device hardware like the Camera and Microphone behind a simple API for configuring, starting, and stopping.

Their parent classes are VideoEncoderCore and AudioEncoderCore, respectively. These two classes handle video/audio specific configuration of AndroidEncoder: our wrapper around Android's MediaCodec.

Under the hood, we use Android's MediaCodec class for encoding H.264 Video and AAC audio with hardware acceleration. Due to the performance requirements of real-time HD encoding, it's not currently feasible to leverage FFmpeg as a software encoder.

Muxing

The Muxer is the heart of any recording configuration. Every recording session synchronizes on a single Muxer, which handles combining all Encoder outputs into a comprehensible output format.

Kickflip currently includes FFmpegMuxer and AndroidMuxer, which both implement the Muxer interface and thus can be used interchangeably. AndroidMuxer employs Android's built-in MediaMuxer and supports only MPEG-4 output. FFmpegMuxer harnesses the power of FFmpeg to write Encoder data to a variety of outputs such as HLS streams (MPEG-TS segments and a .m3u8 manifest file) as well as local MPEG-4 files. FFmpegMuxer can be further developed to write most any output format that supports H.264 video and AAC audio.