Chapter 11. Appeal to the senses using multimedia
In this chapter
- Detecting a device’s capabilities
- Playing back multimedia files
- Using the camera
- Recording audio and video
Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language.
Walt Disney
The Android Market is a vibrant and diverse bazaar of applications and games. You can find applications for listening to music, editing photos, and broadcasting videos among others with a focus on multimedia of one type or another. Obviously, if you want to build an application with a similar focus, then you’ll need to master many of Android’s multimedia APIs. But what if you don’t? What if you’re among the many developers whose applications will focus on something other than multimedia? Should you even care which APIs you’d need to play music or create a thumbnail for a video?
This is a loaded question. This chapter is all about multimedia so we’re not going to start it off by telling you that it won’t be applicable to you. In fact, the opposite is true. No matter what kind of applications you’re developing, there’s a good chance that you’ll need to use some subset of Android’s multimedia APIs. Multimedia is becoming increasingly important for all Android applications.