coil-kt/coil

Add support for MP4 videos

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#605 opened on Dec 3, 2020

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 (10 comments) (19 reactions) (0 assignees)Kotlin (11,779 stars) (757 forks)batch import
enhancementhelp wanted

Description

It would be great if Coil could support short MP4 videos. MP4 is now commonly used for the same use case as GIF, however it's much more efficient. Similar to GIFs, we would have to buffer the video into memory so we wouldn't be able to support large/long videos.

This would not be a replacement for ExoPlayer, which should be used to handle long videos and any advanced functionality. Any Coil MP4 support would likely only support start/stop and how many iterations to repeat.

Contributor guide

Tech stack
kotlinandroid
Domain
mobileperformance
Issue type
feature
DifficultyEstimated implementation difficulty for a new contributor, from 1 for very small changes to 5 for expert-level work.
3
Estimated timeA rough time range for an experienced contributor to investigate, implement, test, and prepare a pull request.
1-2 days
Activity statusHow available the issue appears right now: fresh, active, stale, blocked, or waiting on maintainer input.
fresh
ClarityHow clearly the issue explains the expected change, acceptance criteria, and next step.
clear
Prerequisites
KotlinAndroid developmentCoil image pipeline
Newbie friendlinessA 1-100 score estimating how approachable this issue is for first-time contributors.
60
Research direction
Review Coil's current GIF decoding implementation (likely using android.graphics.Movie or similar) to understand the pattern. Explore Android's MediaCodec API for MP4 video decoding into bitmaps. Check if any existing libraries like 'android gif drawable' have video based equivalents. Consider memory constraints and how to handle multiple frames. Also look at issue comments for additional insights.