How to reduce Buffer time on streaming app?

Question

I'm Building an android app that is supposed to stream an online radio station from a URL.

I am currently working on a demo and I have gotten a lot of help from online tutorials but I have a problem.

When I click on the NEXT button it's supposed to get it's audio from another URL, which gives it the effect of changing the station, but it takes too much time and most times it doesn't seem to work.

Is there any way I could reduce the time by 95% cause I want it to start almost immediately you click on the next button

CODE FOR THE NEXT BUTTON

b_next.setOnClickListener(new View.OnClickListener() {
            @Override
            public void onClick(View view) {
               mediaPlayer.stop();
                mediaPlayer.reset();
                try {
                    mediaPlayer.setDataSource("http://stream.radioreklama.bg/veronika.opus");
                    mediaPlayer.prepare();
                } catch (IOException e) {
                    e.printStackTrace();
                }

                mediaPlayer.start();
            }
        });

Answer 1

The problem may not be buffering- there might be some slow startup time on the server side for example.

Either way, if you want to monitor the buffering there is a call back provided with MediaPlayer which will do this - 'OnBufferingUpdateListener.onBufferingUpdate()'.

From the MediaPlayer documentation (https://developer.android.com/reference/android/media/MediaPlayer.html#setOnPreparedListener(android.media.MediaPlayer.OnPreparedListener)):

While in the Started state, the internal player engine calls a user supplied OnBufferingUpdateListener.onBufferingUpdate() callback method if a OnBufferingUpdateListener has been registered beforehand via setOnBufferingUpdateListener(OnBufferingUpdateListener). This callback allows applications to keep track of the buffering status while streaming audio/video.

One common technique to speed up switching between streams, across platforms, is to have the next stream prepared in advance.

For your case you would need a second media player which you would initialise and move to the prepared state, and possibly even seek to a point, and then play it as soon as you stop the other one.

For live streams this will be a little more difficult as you can't see to a point in the same way. You could experiment with having the second player playing but with the volume turned down, although this is obviously not very efficient, unless you have some reliable way to predict when the user is about to switch.