Book Image

Mastering Android NDK

Book Image

Mastering Android NDK

Overview of this book

Android NDK is used for multimedia applications that require direct access to system resources. NDK is also the key for portability, which in turn allows a reasonably comfortable development and debugging process using familiar tools such as GCC and Clang toolchains. This is a hands-on guide to extending your game development skills with Android NDK. The book takes you through many clear, step-by-step example applications to help you further explore the features of Android NDK and some popular C++ libraries and boost your productivity by debugging the development process. Through the course of this book, you will learn how to write portable multi-threaded native code, use HTTP networking in C++, play audio files, use OpenGL ES 3, and render high-quality text. Each chapter aims to take you one step closer to building your application. By the end of this book, you will be able to create an engaging, complete gaming application.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Mastering Android NDK
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 5. Cross-platform Audio Streaming

In this chapter, we consider the last non-visual component needed to build interactive mobile applications. We are looking for a truly portable implementation of audio playback for Android and desktop PCs. We propose using the OpenAL library, since it is a well-established library on desktop platforms. Audio playback is inherently an asynchronous process, so the decoding and submitting of data to the sound API should be done on a separate thread. We will create an audio streaming library based on the multi-threading code from Chapter 3, Networking.

Raw uncompressed audio can take up a lot of memory, so compressed formats of different flavors are used quite often. We consider some of them in this chapter and will show you how to play them in Android using native C++ code and popular third-party libraries.