When you have to manipulate audio or video on Android, being used to open-source software, you have a single name which comes directly to you: FFmpeg. However, FFmpeg is a C software, meant to be used as an executable, and not officially supporting Android.

There are a lot of partial and/or out-of-date how-to out there on how to get FFmpeg running on Android, like halfninja’s build. However, I needed to use FFmpeg concat demuxer, introduced in FFmpeg 1.1. Most builds target 0.9. There’s a ton of questions on StackOverflow about getting newer FFmpeg releases working on Android. So, here’s a full explanation to get FFmpeg 2.2.3 “Muybridge” working on Android. I’ll describe the steps for Linux, but everything is pretty standard shell and should work on any decent OS.

Prerequisites

First, let’s install everything needed.

Android SDK and NDK

Android SDK is available here while the NDK is available here. You should also set two environment variables ( ANDROID_SDK and ANDROID_NDK ) to their respective installation paths.

On Archlinux, using android-sdk and android-ndk AUR packages:

Setting environment variables for Android SDK/NDK

export ANDROID_NDK = /opt/android-ndk/ export ANDROID_SDK = /opt/android-sdk/

FFmpeg sources

Download FFmpeg sources here and extract them in $ANDROID_NDK/sources/ffmpeg-2.2.3 . Building third-party libraries in $ANDROID_NDK/sources make them easily available to use in other projects.

Building FFmpeg

Configuration

You can tweak the configuration if needed, but here’s the one I used:

FFmpeg configuration

SYSROOT = $ANDROID_NDK /platforms/android-9/arch-arm/ # You should adjust this path depending on your platform, e.g. darwin-x86_64 for Mac OS TOOLCHAIN = $ANDROID_NDK /toolchains/arm-linux-androideabi-4.8/prebuilt/linux-x86_64 CPU = arm PREFIX = $( pwd ) /android/ $CPU # Set these if needed ADDI_CFLAGS = "" ADDI_LDFLAGS = "" ./configure \ --prefix = $PREFIX \ --disable-shared \ --enable-static \ --disable-doc \ --disable-ffmpeg \ --disable-ffplay \ --disable-ffprobe \ --disable-ffserver \ --disable-doc \ --disable-symver \ --enable-protocol = concat \ --enable-protocol = file \ --enable-muxer = mp4 \ --enable-demuxer = mpegts \ --enable-memalign-hack \ --cross-prefix = $TOOLCHAIN /bin/arm-linux-androideabi- \ --target-os = linux \ --arch = arm \ --enable-cross-compile \ --sysroot = $SYSROOT \ --extra-cflags = "-Os -fpic -marm $ADDI_CFLAGS " \ --extra-ldflags = " $ADDI_LDFLAGS "

Compilation

The scariest step is in fact the simplest:

FFmpeg compilation

make clean # Adapt the jobs count to your machine make -j3 make install

Expose FFmpeg to Android NDK

To be able to use FFmpeg as a usual NDK module, we need an Android.mk . It should be placed in $ANDROID_NDK/sources/ffmpeg-2.2.3/android/arm .

Android.mk

LOCAL_PATH := $( call my-dir ) include $( CLEAR_VARS ) LOCAL_MODULE := libavdevice LOCAL_SRC_FILES := lib/libavdevice.a LOCAL_EXPORT_C_INCLUDES := $( LOCAL_PATH ) /include include $( PREBUILT_STATIC_LIBRARY ) include $( CLEAR_VARS ) LOCAL_MODULE := libavcodec LOCAL_SRC_FILES := lib/libavcodec.a LOCAL_EXPORT_C_INCLUDES := $( LOCAL_PATH ) /include include $( PREBUILT_STATIC_LIBRARY ) include $( CLEAR_VARS ) LOCAL_MODULE := libavformat LOCAL_SRC_FILES := lib/libavformat.a LOCAL_EXPORT_C_INCLUDES := $( LOCAL_PATH ) /include include $( PREBUILT_STATIC_LIBRARY ) include $( CLEAR_VARS ) LOCAL_MODULE := libswscale LOCAL_SRC_FILES := lib/libswscale.a LOCAL_EXPORT_C_INCLUDES := $( LOCAL_PATH ) /include include $( PREBUILT_STATIC_LIBRARY ) include $( CLEAR_VARS ) LOCAL_MODULE := libavutil LOCAL_SRC_FILES := lib/libavutil.a LOCAL_EXPORT_C_INCLUDES := $( LOCAL_PATH ) /include include $( PREBUILT_STATIC_LIBRARY ) include $( CLEAR_VARS ) LOCAL_MODULE := libavfilter LOCAL_SRC_FILES := lib/libavfilter.a LOCAL_EXPORT_C_INCLUDES := $( LOCAL_PATH ) /include include $( PREBUILT_STATIC_LIBRARY ) include $( CLEAR_VARS ) LOCAL_MODULE := libswresample LOCAL_SRC_FILES := lib/libswresample.a LOCAL_EXPORT_C_INCLUDES := $( LOCAL_PATH ) /include include $( PREBUILT_STATIC_LIBRARY )

That’s it! FFmpeg is ready to use!

Using FFmpeg

To use FFmpeg, I’ll stick to halfninja’s idea: adapt FFmpeg’s main() to a simple function, and write a JNI interface around it. A sample project is available on GitHub.

Adapting FFmpeg’s main()

I used some FFmpeg’s executable source files ( ffmpeg.c , containing main() , and directly related ones), and tweaked them: removed every exit() call and replaced av_log() calls to use Android’s LogCat. As FFmpeg’s executable is meant to be ran once, then exited, I also needed to reinitialize some static variables between every main() calls.

Update from March 27th 2016: for an up-to-date sample, see this GitHub repository. Thanks Hiko!

JNI interface

The JNI interface is really simple: a simple C wrapper calling FFmpeg’s main() , and a Java wrapper around it.

Here’s the C function, excluding usual JNI boilerplate (complete file is available on GitHub):

JNI C wrapper

JNIEXPORT jboolean JNICALL Java_fr_enoent_videokit_Videokit_run ( JNIEnv * env , jobject obj , jobjectArray args ) { int i = 0 ; int argc = 0 ; char ** argv = NULL ; jstring * strr = NULL ; if ( args != NULL ) { argc = ( * env ) -> GetArrayLength ( env , args ); argv = ( char ** ) malloc ( sizeof ( char * ) * argc ); strr = ( jstring * ) malloc ( sizeof ( jstring ) * argc ); for ( i = 0 ; i < argc ; ++ i ) { strr [ i ] = ( jstring )( * env ) -> GetObjectArrayElement ( env , args , i ); argv [ i ] = ( char * )( * env ) -> GetStringUTFChars ( env , strr [ i ], 0 ); LOGI ( "Option: %s" , argv [ i ]); } } LOGI ( "Running main" ); int result = main ( argc , argv ); LOGI ( "Main ended with status %d" , result ); for ( i = 0 ; i < argc ; ++ i ) { ( * env ) -> ReleaseStringUTFChars ( env , strr [ i ], argv [ i ]); } free ( argv ); free ( strr ); return result == 0 ; }

The function simply takes JNI arguments ( jobject obj and jobjectArray args ) and creates matching char* parameters. These parameters are then passed to FFmpeg’s main() . It then returns true if everything was fine (FFmpeg returned 0 ), false otherwise.

The Java part is even simpler. Once again, only the interesting part:

JNI Java wrapper

package fr.enoent.videokit ; public final class Videokit { // Truncated library loading, see complete file on GitHub /** * Call FFmpeg with specified arguments * @param args FFmpeg arguments * @return true if success, false otherwise */ public boolean process ( String [] args ) { String [] params = new String [ args . length + 1 ]; params [ 0 ] = "ffmpeg" ; System . arraycopy ( args , 0 , params , 1 , args . length ); return run ( params ); } private native boolean run ( String [] args ); }

The native run() method is pretty obvious: it simply calls the previous C function. However, FFmpeg’s main() expects to see the executable name as its first parameter. Even if we don’t compile it as an executable file, I found it simpler to add this parameter than modifying FFmpeg code to not use it. Hence the process() method, which is the only public interface to call FFmpeg. It simply adds ffmpeg as first parameter, then calls run() .

Call FFmpeg from Java

Once we have the JNI wrapper in place, calling FFmpeg from Java code is really straightforward. Here’s a sample call which trims the video available on /sdcard/input.mp4 to keep only 15 seconds of it, and write the result to /sdcard/output.mp4 :

Using FFmpeg

if ( Videokit . getInstance (). process ( new String [] { "-y" , // Overwrite output files "-i" , // Input file "/sdcard/input.mp4" , "-ss" , // Start position "0" , "-t" , // Duration "15" , "-vcodec" , // Video codec "copy" , "-acodec" , // Audio codec "copy" , "/sdcard/output.mp4" // Output file )) { Log . d ( TAG , "Trimming: success" ); } else { Log . d ( TAG , "Trimming: failure" ); }

Conclusion

While using FFmpeg on Android is really useful when dealing with audio and video files, it wasn’t as easy as one could think to get it working the first time, with an up-to-date FFmpeg version. However, once set up, it works great, with decent performances even on mid-end hardware.