CWAC-MediaRouter: Going Where Google Declined To Go, For Some Reason...

This project offers a port of MediaRouteActionProvider, and its support classes, to work with native API Level 11+ fragments and the action bar. These were ported from the mediarouter Android library project, where these classes require the appcompat action bar and, hence, the fragment backport.

The sincere hope is that Google will ship an equivalent to this someday, at which point in time this library will be deprecated.

Installation

This Android library project is available as a JAR.

This project is also available as an artifact for use with Gradle. To use that, add the following blocks to your build.gradle file:

repositories {
    maven {
        url "https://repo.commonsware.com.s3.amazonaws.com"
    }
}

dependencies {
    compile 'com.commonsware.cwac:mediarouter:0.1.0'
}

Or, if you cannot use SSL, use http://repo.commonsware.com for the repository URL.

Note that this library contains a copy of the support-v4 JAR in its libs/. This is presently required to keep project-level compatibility between Eclipse and Gradle. This will hopefully be addressed in a future version of this library.

Usage: MediaRouteActionProvider

You use this the same as you would use the official mediarouter edition, with the following changes:

• Use Activity instead of ActionBarActivity.

• Use the native API Level 11 version of fragments, rather than the Android Support package's backport.

• You do not need (or want) a theme based on Theme.AppCompat, but rather can use ordinary themes (e.g., Theme.Holo.Light.DarkActionBar).

• Your menu resources and such will need to reference com.commonsware.cwac.mediarouter.MediaRouteActionProvider rather than android.support.v7.app.MediaRouteActionProvider. Menu resources should also use the regular android:actionProviderClass attribute for specifying this class, rather than the alternative required by appcompat (e.g., app:actionProviderClass).

• Your import for MediaRouteActionProvider will need to change to the aforementioned class. Most other android.support.v7 imports will remain as-is, particularly MediaRouter itself. If you are using an IDE that supports bulk import resolution (e.g., Eclipse with Ctrl-Shift-O), you might consider deleting all android.support.v7 imports and let the IDE help you grab the com.commonsware.cwac.mediarouter ones where needed.

Dependencies

This project depends upon the mediarouter library project, because it still references classes from there, particularly MediaRouter itself. That, in turn, will require appcompat. However, your code will not need to use appcompat, and ProGuard should strip a lot of the junk out.

The minimum supported SDK for this library is API Level 14. If you want to support older devices, you should be using appcompat and the fragments backport anyway.

Version

This is version v0.1.0 of this module, meaning it is a wee bit more than a proof of concept, but not by all that much.

Demo

There are two sample projects, demo/ and demo-remoteplayback/, that illustrate the use of this library. The first one just shows the MediaRouteActionProvider and shows you the route when it changes. The second one demonstrates the currently-flaky RemotePlaybackClient class, for playing back media on a device like a Chromecast.

License

The code in this project is licensed under the Apache Software License 2.0, per the terms of the included LICENSE file. Most of the library's code is licensed this way by Google; the changes made to that code to implement the port are licensed this way by CommonsWare.

Questions

If you have questions regarding the use of this code, please post a question on StackOverflow tagged with commonsware and android. Be sure to indicate what CWAC module you are having issues with, and be sure to include source code and stack traces if you are encountering crashes.

If you have encountered what is clearly a bug, or if you have a feature request, please post an issue. Be certain to include complete steps for reproducing the issue.

Do not ask for help via Twitter.

Also, if you plan on hacking on the code with an eye for contributing something back, please open an issue that we can use for discussing implementation details. Just lobbing a pull request over the fence may work, but it may not.

Release Notes

• v0.1.0: initial release

Who Made This?