I am very confused with ExoPlayer and their documentation. Can anyone please explain me for what purpose and when should we use CacheDataSource and SimpleCache?
CacheDataSource
and SimpleCache
fulfill two different purposes. If you take a look at their class prototype you will see that CacheDataSource implements DataSource
and SimpleCache implements Cache
. When you need to cache your downloaded videos you have to use CacheDataSource
as your DataSource.Factory
to prepare your media playback:
// Produces DataSource instances through which media data is loaded.
DataSource.Factory dataSourceFactory = new DefaultDataSourceFactory(context, Util.getUserAgent(context, "AppName"));
dataSourceFactory = new CacheDataSourceFactory(VideoCacheSingleton.getInstance(), dataSourceFactory);
And then use dataSourceFactory
to create a MediaSource
:
// This is the MediaSource representing the media to be played.
MediaSource mediaSource = new ProgressiveMediaSource.Factory(dataSourceFactory)
.createMediaSource(mediaUri);
SimpleExoPlayer exoPlayerInstance = new SimpleExoPlayer.Builder(context).build();
exoPlayerInstance.prepare(mediaSource);
While SimpleCache
offers you a cache implementation that maintains an in-memory representation. As you can see in the first code block a CacheDataSourceFactory constructor needs a Cache
instance to work with. You can either declare your own caching mechanism or use the default SimpleCache
class that ExoPlayer provides you. If you need to use the default implementation you should keep this in mind:
Only one instance of SimpleCache is allowed for a given directory at a given time
As per the documentation. So in order to use a single instance of SimpleCache
for a folder we use singleton declaration pattern:
public class VideoCacheSingleton {
private static final int MAX_VIDEO_CACHE_SIZE_IN_BYTES = 200 * 1024 * 1024; // 200MB
private static Cache sInstance;
public static Cache getInstance(Context context) {
if (sInstance != null) return sInstance;
else return sInstance = new SimpleCache(new File(context.getCacheDir(), "video"), new LeastRecentlyUsedCacheEvictor(MAX_VIDEO_CACHE_SIZE_IN_BYTES), new ExoDatabaseProvider(context)));
}
}
We use CacheDataSource
to prepare a caching media playback and SimpleCache
to build its DataSource.Factory
instance.