[pdm9]

I am aware from several posts on this board (and others!) that the current round of Nokia devices do not support streaming of audio or video. By this I am not talking about support for the RTP protocol or even any other datagram protocol, but simply that the Player implementations attempt to read the entire contents of a SourceStream before commencing playback (and so end up running out of memory before even starting to play anything if the SourceStream encapsulates a stream of continuous media).

As the Symbian operating system appears to support streaming (at least that's what the prescence of documents from Nokia such as "Series 60 Developer Platform 2.0: Audio Streaming Example v1.0" suggests), it would seem then that this is purely a limitation in the J2ME implementation and not a shortcoming in the actual phone operating system. Is this the case? Has anyone been able to find an ingenious way around this? The discussions I have seen seem to suggest that the best that can be done is to attempt to stitch together multiple Players, but I cannot imagine that this is satisfactory.

Does anyone have any experience of attempting to stream to other manufacturer's handsets? Does it just seem to be the Nokia implementation that is lacking, or is this not supported on handsets from Sony-Ericsson, Samsung, Siemens, etc. either?

Finally (and I guess a Nokia employee would be best placed to answer this but I'd welcome all input!), does anyone know if the next round of Nokia handsets will support streaming (i.e. at the very least have a J2ME implementation that behaves with SourceStreams that represent continuous media)?

Thanks in advance to anyone who can provide any helpful information!

[niveas]

Hi, even i am interested in streaming audio/video using J2ME on symbian OS. could you please share any pertinent info u might have regarding this. Do i need to implement my own player or extend my player from the existing player classes in the nokia sdk for 6630(i.e NDS suite for J2ME version 2.2)?

[rainersimon]

I'm also in the process of totally twisting my brain on this topic :-) After going through numerous forum posts, I would also greatly appreciate some expert advice.

I'm currently trying to implement a solution that buffer data coming from a socket StreamSource in byte arrays. (So there's also no RTP or anything particularily sophisticated involved). My main question is:

Is it really true that current MIDP implementations will NEVER start playing before the entire InputStream is read? Or is this just the case for formats that are, by nature, no dedicated 'streaming formats'. (E.g. MPEG-1 is AFAIK not originally inteded for streaming, while 3GPP is?)

-Ray

[fmsware]

I've only come across one phone with documented streaming support (Sony Ericsson V800). Some Sprint phones may work. I haven't seen anything recently regarding streaming on the latest Nokias. The only way to simulate streaming is to use multiple players to buffer the stream. This works, but causes a slight audible break when switching players as the native buffer is initialized.

[rainersimon]

Originally posted by fmsware
I've only come across one phone with documented streaming support (Sony Ericsson V800). Some Sprint phones may work. I haven't seen anything recently regarding streaming on the latest Nokias. The only way to simulate streaming is to use multiple players to buffer the stream. This works, but causes a slight audible break when switching players as the native buffer is initialized.

I started to implement this solution. So far it works (in the emulator ;-). However the problem is that I keep running out of memory. It seems that the garbage collection doesn't discard the obsolete data fast enough (calling Runtime.getRuntime().gc doesnt't help either). Has anyone seen this problem (and gotten around it? :-)

Ray