How To Play Raw H264 Produced By MediaCodec Encoder?

I'm a bit new when it comes to MediaCodec (and video encoding/decoding in general), so correct me if anything I say here is wrong. I want to play the raw h264 output of MediaCodec

Solution 1:

You should be able to play back a raw H264 stream (as you wrote, other raw .264 files play back just fine with VLC or ffplay), but you are missing the parameter sets. These are passed in two different ways, and you happen to be missing both. First they are returned in MediaFormat when you get MediaCodec.INFO_OUTPUT_FORMAT_CHANGED (which you don't handle, you just log a message about it), secondly they are returned in a buffer with MediaCodec.BUFFER_FLAG_CODEC_CONFIG set (which you ignore by setting the size to 0). The simplest solution here is to remove the special case handling of MediaCodec.BUFFER_FLAG_CODEC_CONFIG, and it should all work just fine.

The code you've based it on does things this way in order to test all the different ways of doing things - where you copied it from, the parameter sets were carried in the MediaFormat from MediaCodec.INFO_OUTPUT_FORMAT_CHANGED. If you wanted to use that in your case with a raw H264 bytestream, you could write the byte buffers with keys csd-0 and csd-1 from the MediaFormat and keep ignoring the buffers with MediaCodec.BUFFER_FLAG_CODEC_CONFIG set.

Solution 2:

You cannot play just raw h264. It does not have any information about format. You also can find several great examples here. In order to stream you need to implement some streaming protocol like RTSP (in a case of real time streaming) or more flexible HLS (if real time is not required)