buildscripts

Building

Compiling the native parts is a process separate from Gradle and the app won't function if you skip this.

This process is supported on Linux and macOS. Windows (or WSL) will not work.

Download dependencies

download.sh will take care of installing the Android SDK, NDK and downloading the sources.

If you're running on Debian/Ubuntu or RHEL/Fedora it will also install the necessary dependencies for you.

./download.sh

If you already have the Android SDK installed you can symlink android-sdk-linux to your SDK root before running the script, it will still install the necessary SDK packages.

A matching NDK version inside the SDK will be picked up automatically or downloaded/installed otherwise.

Build

./buildall.sh

Run buildall.sh with --clean to clean the build directories before building. For a guaranteed clean build also do a rm -rf prefix beforehand.

Building for just 32-bit ARM (which is the default) is fine generally. However if you want to make use of AArch64 or are targeting Intel x86 devices, these architectures can be optionally be built into the same APK.

To do this run one (or more) of these commands before ./buildall.sh:

./buildall.sh --arch arm64 mpv
./buildall.sh --arch x86 mpv
./buildall.sh --arch x86_64 mpv

Developing

Getting logs

adb logcat # get all logs, useful when drivers/vendor libs output to logcat
adb logcat -s "mpv" # get only mpv logs

Rebuilding a single component

If you've made changes to a single component (e.g. ffmpeg or mpv) and want a new build you can of course just run ./buildall.sh but it's also possible to just build a single component like this:

./buildall.sh -n ffmpeg
# optional: add --clean to build from a clean state

Note that you might need to be rebuild for other architectures (--arch) too depending on your device.

Afterwards, build mpv-android and install the apk:

./buildall.sh -n
adb install -r ../app/build/outputs/apk/debug/app-debug.apk

Using Android Studio

You can use Android Studio to develop the Java part of the codebase. Before using it, make sure to build the project at least once by following the steps in the Build section.

You should point Android Studio to existing SDK installation at mpv-android/buildscripts/sdk/android-sdk-linux. Then click "Open an existing Android Studio project" and select mpv-android.

If Android Studio complains about project sync failing (Error:Exception thrown while executing model rule: NdkComponentModelPlugin.Rules#createNativeBuildModel), go to "File -> Project Structure -> SDK Location" and set "Android NDK Location" to mpv-android/buildscripts/sdk/android-ndk-rVERSION.

Note that if you build from Android Studio only the Java part will be built. If you make any changes to libraries (ffmpeg, mpv, ...) or mpv-android native code (app/src/main/jni/*), first rebuild native code with:

./buildall.sh -n

then build the project from Android Studio.

Also, debugging native code does not work from within the studio at the moment, you will have to use gdb for that.

Debugging native code with gdb

You first need to rebuild mpv-android with gdbserver support:

NDK_DEBUG=1 ./buildall.sh -n
adb install -r ../app/build/outputs/apk/debug/app-debug.apk

After that, ndk-gdb can be used to debug the app:

cd mpv-android/app/src/main/
../../../buildscripts/sdk/android-ndk-r*/ndk-gdb --launch