Acoustic Echo Cancellation in AIR Mobile on iOS - using Native Extensions?

Question

We are developing a video chat app for iOS using AIR Mobile and the acoustic echo is a real show stopper. getEnhancedMicrophone() returns null so apparently Adobe can't help us here.

However, unlike Android, it looks like acoustic echo cancellation is a standard feature on iOS. Is there a way to use Native Extensions, for example, to enable AEC in our app using kAudioUnitSubType_VoiceProcessingIO?

This question is iOS-only, we're not interested in Android at this point.

Hemipterous

Answer 1

Unfortunately, I am pretty sure you cannot use a native extension (ANE) for this to work with AIR mobile. NetStream can only attach Adobe's Camera and Microphone classes so there is no integration point.

And as you know, as of December 17, 2015, Adobe has still not addressed AEC for AIR on mobile devices, on either Apple or Android platforms.

However, a contact of mine talked with Chris Campbell at Adobe a couple of times early in 2015 regarding AEC for AIR Mobile, and Chris said at one point that they had cleared legal WRT licensing issues related to AEC, and he was pitching AEC for inclusion in AIR 20 for Mobile (December 2015) so it's possible it will be announced soon, though I'm not holding my breath.

I haven't seen any other public indications that Adobe is going to do this. I know it would be a tremendous enabler for developers of video chat-based apps, to include support for mobile devices.

Pitts

Thanks for an update and your insights on this. We've been holding our breath for AEC in AIR Mobile for too long and just went with WebRTC in the end. – Hemipterous

Thanks for your comment Jamix. We spent some time researching and playing with WebRTC and estimated porting all our Adobe video chat products to use it. Were you able to leverage your Adobe Flash/AIR investment with WebRTC? Or did you bit the bullet and go native in order to integrate with WebRTC? We were also concerned about WebRTC not being ready yet, or for quite some time, requiring us to create a bypass browser plug in for when the browser doesn't support WebRTC. We are looking now into Vidyo as well, but again, have to go native to integrate. – Pitts

We bit the bullet and went native on iOS: bloggeek.me/flash-webrtc-gruveo-finally-converted Temasys WebRTC plugin is free and it enables WebRTC in desktop IE and Safari no problem. After more than a year, we have no regrets. – Hemipterous