How to achieve real time video editing on Android?

Question

I've been working recently on a video-editing-related project on Android, and am desperately looking for resources related to video editing on the platform.

The only video-editing related "method" or information I could find was using the FFmpeg library, which is pretty rich in features and capabilities but works really slow, operations such as reversing a 10-second video can take as long as 30 seconds, which delivers a really poor user experience.

That being said, it seems that there are tons of Android video-editing apps that are capable of doing everything FFmpeg can, only in almost immediate periods of time (apps such as InShot, PocketVideo or even the previous musical.ly TikTok).

I've tried researching and searching for information on the topic in almost any reasonable place (Google, GitHub, YouTube, the Android developer center, and even on "support" pages of the above-mentioned apps) to no avail (no explanatory documents, no open source libraries, not even demo apps), if anyone could shed some light on the subject that would be much, much appreciated!

Thanks.

Magdalenamagdalene

searching same things mention you above. if you have any idea regarding real time video editing please let me know. – Steadman

Hey did you find anything? – Bannerol

From my understanding so far there are two ways: the first one is using Media Codec API, the second one is to use C++. I also found a valid chinese premium library, Meishe SDK. Media Codec API are really complex to use and have issue with different devices. – Aude

Answer 1

FFmpeg on platforms other than desktops would be work very slow mostly because of lack hardware decode/encode capabilities.

If you want to create fast/realtime video editing suite you'd better to look at native android video decode/encode api and filter frames on GPU.

Although phones' screens may seem quite small, video resolution is big enough to totally occupy CPU even with basic processing like color inversion, needless to say what would be when blur is applied. So consider using GPU processing instead (GLSL shaders).

Skysail