Hello!

hello, Dmitry!

how can I help you today?

Actually, I met the same problem as always. I was waiting for a chat 3 days. And found solutions for all problems by myself :)

Even if all of them were not simple for sure.

I'm glad that you got past those problems!

ah, yes, I remember that

I was looking for separating the processes - but it didn't help. Accessibility service didn't start when I set `isolatedProcess` to True. Or even when I just set `process` name in the manifest file

I am surprised that the android:process did not work, but I have little experience with AccessibilityService

But I found out that TalkBack Accessibility service is not terminated by the system. So I found its source code in Github, and checked the settings of the accessibility service in the project.

hello, Leora!

Hi Mark! I'm on time :)

Dmitry: I can take a question from you if you have one; if not, I should let Leora ask a question

Hi Dmitry!

Hi Leora!

my guess is that was a Xiaomi decision to pay attention to that and behave as it is

I finished. The question is not exactly about android actually. I think I will wait

OK, I will be back with you shortly

Leora: how can I help you today?

Hey, so I have a bunch of heavy video clips in this app.

They seem to be more quality than I need for a small screen

So, can you tell me the minimum size or resolution or...whatever factor...I need for small screens

Like compress them I guess?

And if to put a second set (presumably the originals) for tablets

well, there are some phones that have fairly high-resolution screens (4K, even)

so, really, the answer of "minimum size" is to try something and see if it looks OK to you and to whoever needs to approve this change

Yes, but 4.9MB for a 6 second video (and it's a child's app! but my boss wants top quality)

that size seems excessive

what is the file format? MP4?

what factor do I look for to start - size?

yes mp4

if your boss wants top quality, then my guess is that you should be focusing first on making the boss happy :-)

then I have another 6 second one that's only 900KB, another 1.3MB etc

what versions of Android are you supporting? IOW, what is your minSdkVersion?

But couldn't I compress this at say 75% at least with no visual difference on a small screen?

minSDK 21

MP4 is already compressed

hence, I am assuming that by "compress" you mean "change the resolution"

even on a tablet it looks amazing, so I'm assuming there's room to downsize for telephones

you can certainly use a video transcoding tool to change the resolution

umm...yes?

but I cannot tell you whether it will be acceptable to your boss

hahaha of course not

but what parameters do I look for?

here, by "resolution", I am referring to the number of pixels in each dimension (X, Y)

a video player or other tool can probably tell you what the resolution is

I am an Ubuntu user; if I want that information, I right-click on the video file in the Nautilus file explorer, and I can get that from the properties dialog

ok, you want to come back to me I will check?

sure, let me know when you are ready!

Before question. I read your book about Android 6.0. it was 5 years ago approximately. It boosted my growth in Android Development and I used it several years after for searching deep docs about webview and other android services. Since then I made tons of great features, created complicated architectures and now managing several different projects. I find a lot of interesting facts during development, for example the one I found for Xiaomi recently. But for me it is not clear if my ideas and solutions are valuable for the community. And it stops me from writing any blog posts about anything. The question is: How to deal with my doubts and do you have an idea how I can be sure that the research and solution will rich the community?

in the meantime...

I was ubuntu for 4 months :/ wifi disconnected constantly

and on windows other problems!

Dmitry: "How to deal with my doubts and do you have an idea how I can be sure that the research and solution will rich the community?" -- personally, I would not worry about the "will rich the community" part

write what you want to write

if it is useful, people will find it

usually, there is little harm in writing something

and the act of writing it down may have its own value to you, both personally and for your career

Dmitry: if you have another question, go right ahead!

Usually, I finish with the fact: probably it is written by someone else already. And my text would be just developing a bicycle.

if it took you X hours to come up with a solution, probably it would take the next person a similar amount of time

if there was something already written that took the X hours down to Y minutes, you probably would have found it in your own research

And the second the most annoying fact: I don't use TDD in development. I know how to write tests, but always take too much time, and the task on the beginning not clear enough to write tests before MVP version of the feature.

and, even if it exists but you did not find it, by writing your own piece, you increase the likelihood that somebody else will find the solution, either by finding yours or finding the earlier work

personally, I have yet to work on any project for a customer that really does TDD

TDD proponents talk a lot about TDD, but I have little evidence that TDD is all that common

it's a lovely concept, in a "it would be lovely if I were not balding" sort of way -- a very nice idea that may not be practical in many cases

Hearing this from you is very helping, thanks!

haha you really need to add emojis to this chat :)

🤔

ooo not fair

(Campfire does not support emojis in any direct fashion, but you can copy-and-paste them in from Emojipedia or elsewhere)

😊

Leora: did you find your video resolution?

(if not, that's OK -- I just wanted to check)

Thank you for your support! I will probably write my first article about themes switching.

yes, and it's a surprisingly regular 1280x720

Dmitry: sounds good!

dark/light

Leora: I am surprised that a 6 second video at that resolution wound up that large

(in terms of file size)

Have a good day, Mark, Leora!

Yay Dmitry! Go for it!

Dmitry: you too!

Leora: is there somebody on your team who is responsible for creating the videos? can you ask them to give you smaller files?

also, do the videos have sound or are they silent?

how can the same duration videos of the same resolution wind up different weights?

yes i can but i need to know what to tell him or I can change them myself with FFMPEG

since it's in cmd and he doesn't know how

MP4, like MP3 and JPEG, uses lossy compression, so the complexity of the video and the range of the color palette can affect the resulting file size

ohhhh I see

still surprised that a video clip of a duck will be that much less/more than that of a horse

I suspect that reducing the resolution further is not going to be a good approach, unless you are fairly certain that your app will be used mostly by low-end phones -- I would worry that a lower-resolution video will look poor on high-resolution phones

however, there may be color depth or other settings that you can play with

if the videos were silent, you could consider converting them to animated WebP images -- I recently converted some animated GIFs to animated WebP for an Android project and was stunned how small the WebPs got

you could try converting the MP4s to WebM and see if they still play back and how big the files are

they aren't silent

and there may be other tricks you could use -- I certainly am not a video format expert

i see there's a value called data rate that's much smaller in the lighter videos of the same durtion

"frame rate" would refer to frames per second

I am not certain what "data rate" would mean in this context

maybe the data rate is what you are saying about color depth etc

possibly -- it might be some combination of frame rate and average frame size in bytes or something

so webM would be for 'talkies' correct?

yes, it is a video container format, like MP4: https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/medi...

VP8 and VP9 are the relevant codecs, and those work on your versions of Android

ok I'll look into it

personally, if I need "higher level" stuff than FFMPEG, I'll turn to tools with "presets" for various types of devices, like Handbrake

Handbrake eh? Yeah I's prefer that he'll have UI and deal with it

another question but hopefully less complicated

Have you released to the Chinese markets?

not directly

then indeirectly? haha

AFAIK, none of my consulting clients have distributed outside of the Play Store -- at least, they never mentioned it

back when I used to ship *The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development* in APK form, that might have wound up in China, but I distributed directly from my Web site

ok well, then it;s my funeral

so, I have no experience with Chinese app markets, other than there are a lot of them

btw ...i have downloaded all your books and their updates. if i'm looking for a specific topic, do you have a general directory?

kinda cumbersome to open each pdf and do a search

there is full-text search on https://wares.commonsware.com

the Web site full-text search spans all the books

oooooo! wow. glad I asked :)

Thanks Mark, for all you do

happy to help!

Good day sir

you too!