title: How to get Android to play a high quality RTSP stream smoothly?
body: <p>Does anybody have any luck streaming a high quality video (over 1000kbps) to Android through RTSP?</p>
  <p>We currently have low quality video streams (around 200kbps) that work wonderfully over 3G. Now we are trying to serve a high-quality stream for when the user has a faster connection. The high quality videos play smoothly in VLC, but the Android playback seems to drop frames and get blocky, even on a 4 megabit connection.</p>
  <p>It seems like the YouTube app uses a plain HTTP download for their high quality videos. This works well and plays smoothly, but will not work for streaming live videos. Has anybody had luck streaming high quality videos to Android through RTSP?</p>
  <p>The videos are encoded using H.264, 1500kbps, 24fps, and a 720x480 resolution. In the app, we are using a VideoView to play the videos. We are using Darwin Streaming Server, but we are open to other options if necessary.</p>
  <h1>Update 6/23/2011</h1>
  <p>Looking through Darwin some more today. So far, I am just logging the request and session information in a Darwin module.</p>
  <p>The original Droid tries to use these settings: <code>3GPP-Adaptation:...size=131072;target-time=4000</code>. Although that means it wants 4 seconds of buffer, 131Kb only holds about a second of playback at 1200kbps. I understand that 1200kbps is large, but it is necessary for a high quality video (minimal compression on 720x480).</p>
  <p>I am trying to force the client to buffer more, but I haven't figured out how to do that yet. I'm just looking through the Darwin Streaming Server source and trying to figure out how they do things. Any Darwin experts out there?</p>
  <h1>Update 6/24/2011</h1>
  <p>As it turns out, using plain old HTTP for viewing videos on demand works well with no loss of quality. When we get to live streaming, we will have to look more into RTSP.</p>