Electric Sheep for Android 2.1+ using Live Wallpaper?

Tue, 11/09/2010 - 00:56 — headrift

I'll start by mentioning this thread from the user forum: http://community.electricsheep.org/node/739 ...that said, this is a cool idea that I think has to be done. Androids doing Electric Sheep. How can it not happen? I have an Android. I have Eclipse installed. I know Java and XML. I use Electric Sheep. If I can get some guidance on this, I'd be happy to lay down some code to get this working and bring those things together. I think if all it does is display sheep instead of rendering that will keep the phone CPU from bogging down, and the sheep themselves seem to be ~2.5MB on average, which isn't that bad, and I can live with not having 10GB of sheep on my phone anyway. So... this is where I need help. Some of this I can figure out, and I'll look again in a few hours in more detail at the tutorials I can find, but from here I'm clueless. If someone can explain why this isn't going to work, I'd rather hear it now than later. Advice is requested on this. Thanks.

Wed, 11/10/2010 - 23:06 — headrift

Okay... so far all I've done

Okay... so far all I've done is establish that the sheep .avi files (random grab from my ~/.electricsheep directory) don't play on Android. Probably a codec issue, but the wiki for 2.7 says that the files are moving to x264... a bit of confusion there, as I'm not sure if I need to work around an MPEG-2 codec or not. Could also be an interleaving issue. *shrug* I looked at it because I think I can get a MediaPlayer object into a Live Wallpaper object. If there aren't or won't be h.264 sheep that little idea is screwed, which would suck because live wallpapers go for ~$2 US in the Market. The user forum is talking $1, which I would pay recurrently if it meant my phone got prioritized under the "freemium" system. Apart from that, there's the 1.2 compressed MB of flam3 3.0 to be transposed to Android's Java. Whee. Good thing I have spare time. :)

Thu, 11/11/2010 - 01:47 — spot

thanks for pursuing the idea

thanks for pursuing the idea -- i look forward to getting into it.

the the current sheep are x264, i am surprised MediaPlayer doesn't handle them actually.

Thu, 11/11/2010 - 14:26 — headrift

Thanks for the reply.

Thanks for the reply. :) The sheep are still not playing... I think it's that they use an avi container instead of an mp4 container. Tried changing the container with ffmpeg, but I'm having trouble finding the correct incantation. :-/

Fri, 11/12/2010 - 00:17 — headrift

...oookay. Found it.

...oookay. Found it. Invoking `ffmpeg -i sheep.avi -vcodec mpeg4 -s 352x240 sheep.mp4` makes a playable sheep. Using the "copy" or "libx264" vcodec options doesn't fly, nor does removing the size option. I haven't spent the time to fine tune the options beyond that since this tells me that the codec and container of the avi sheep would both need to be modified, as well as the avi being too large in size -- I could be wrong, of course, but after hammering at this all day I'm starting to doubt that. From here, I'm tempted to put this project down since I'm thinking that getting sheep on an Android would require a whole new flock to keep from re-encoding on the phone, which would be slow and ugly to code and execute. Not to say I think it's a bad idea, just that at this point, that's what it looks like. Also, I'm thinking "phones" here because I'm willing to bet that there are similar problems to be overcome on iOS and whatever else... so it might be worth it to go ahead and hack at the existing code base, but then again... *shrug*