Thursday, December 16, 2010

SWF Transcoder

So as you may know, I like phones. It seems the world is migrating away from traditional desktop and laptop computers and adopting a more mobile model. Despite mobile's maaaaaaany many many many many drawbacks, there is still a place for mobile devices. So that's where I find myself interested in nowadays.

As a result I decided to enroll in CSCE 4930 under Dr. Garlick. Due tonight is my android app for the class. Rather than working on the app, I'm blogging about it right now. Great idea right?

It's called SWF Transcoder
I'm going to have to pat myself on the back for this icon. *Pat Pat.

What it does is it takes flash content, namely content from youtube, and transcodes it into a standard codec; namely any codec readable by Android phones. Right now all it can do is SWF to MP3, but I'll add OGG and MP4 later. The resulting MP3 file is saved to your SD card on the phone and is then fully available to be played to your heart's content in your media player.

A very basic UI at the moment

Anyway all you do is search for a youtube video, select it, and then in 3-4 minutes the MP3 pops up in /sdcard/SWF_Transcoder/song.mp3. It happens Like this: the mobile phone sends a search request to youtube.com and is returned an XML file containing all the search results for the given query. Then, I used the Java SAX XML Parser to parse the results into an Object list, and then when the user selects a video, the phone gets an mp3 file of the video.

Actually it would be much easier and sell much better if I just said "IT'S LIKE MAGIC!!"

The app is not in the Android market, mind you. It's far too under-developed and inefficient to release. Perhaps in the near future I could release it if I polish it up a bit and make it more efficient. As for now, hopefully it will score me an A in 4930.