Playback of immersive 360° video on Android is usually done in a WebView with an HTML5 video player. This tutorial demonstrates how to display 360° video in a native view widget to save the overhead of a whole browser stack. This is done by using the versatile Spectaculum view widget for video rendering and the popular ExoPlayer for video decoding. Both of these libraries are open source under the Apache 2.0 license and available on GitHub and the JCenter repository.

Spectaculum is a view widget for Android to display visual content in a GLES accelerated context, providing zooming and panning functionality, parameterized shader effects, and frame grabbing. It comes with additional views that save developers a lot of time and implement all functionality for displaying bitmap images, camera preview, and videos through the Android MediaPlayer, MediaPlayer Extended, and ExoPlayer. The packaged shader effects range from simple color filters to immersive 360° VR video rendering.

Publishing a JavaScript library can be overwhelming these days. You want to reach a crowd as broad as possible, but there are dozens of different approaches existing and choices to be made. This article is a quick summary of current best practices, which are developing with npm, and publishing via npm and Bower package managers as well as a universal standalone distributable file. To follow, you need to be familiar with npm.

GalleryGrid.js is a simple JavaScript library that transforms a list of images into a nice Google+/Flickr style whitespace-less grid. It is now available under the MIT license on GitHub and through package managers.

LAIS.Foto is a voluntary project that I developed a few months ago for a friend. It’s a self-hosted online photo sharing platform with community features, similar to Flickr. Compared to other existing platforms, it features a unique upload and download workflow with an intermediate moderation step, tailored to the principle of donating and requesting pictures.

The inner workings of Bintray’s Maven repositories, and especially their inclusion into JCenter, are a bit nebulous and scarcely documented. Depending on your artifact structure, you might find your packages incompletely published in JCenter. Here’s an explanation to help you fix this.

Protyposis Multimedia Solutions is the label under which I provide professional software development services in the multimedia domain.

Since the previous post from about a year ago, the ITEC MediaPlayer for Android has evolved to its second major version, receiving a lot of bugfixes, a rewritten playback core with huge performance improvements, and the ability to playback audio-only sources. Its new name now bumps it to version 3.0, and it is reaching a point where I feel confident that it can be used in production. In fact, people are already starting to use it.

Klubus is a small and simple Android app to quickly check departure times at all public transport stops and stations across the City of Klagenfurt am Wörthersee, Austria. It is made for people who are familiar with the transport network and just want a quick and simple way to check the departure times, and is now available on the Play Store.

My Huawei Webcube suddenly stopped working. Like often when AC-powered devices fail, the problem is a broken capacitor in the power supply circuit. Here’s a quick guide on how to check if this is the problem and how to fix it.