What formats of video will play in emulator?

Question

What formats of video file are supported in the Android emulator?

I understand that it probably won't play in real time, but what ones will play at all?

Piero

Answer 1

It supports H.263 encoding and decoding, H.264 AVC and MPEG-4 SP both only decoding.

On an emulator the playback quality in terms of speed or lags might be a bit cumbersome.

Checkout the chart of all supported media formats for more information.

Morgen

In particular, your ability to play video in an emulator will be governed by the native speed of the emulator (e.g., the Honeycomb preview is more of a dog than anything before it) and the speed of your underlying PC. For example, on some older emulators, I can play back an MP4 file fine on a quad-core 2.66GHz Linux machine with a 512MB PCI-X video card. That same MP4 will not play back on a dual-core 2.5GHz Windows/Linux notebook with a 128MB discrete graphics card. If you're serious about video, you're going to need hardware. – Gig

Worth noting that with H.264 only the baseline profile is actually supported. I nearly drove myself crazy trying to figure out why a video was non-playable despite seemingly being compatible. Turns out it was encoded using the main profile. Which works fine on an actual Android device, but is unsupported in the emulator. – Architect

Answer 2

The secret is that the emulator will play the MP4 baseline profile, while real devices will also play better MP4 profiles.

In order to get a video file that plays properly in the emulator, try these settings:

ffmpeg -i inputvideo.wmv -vcodec libx264 -vprofile baseline outputvideo.mp4

Hiddenite