How to speed up the connection to IP camera in Android app?

Question

I'm developing an Android app (Android 5.1) for playing the video stream from IP camera using the RTSP protocol.

I receive and display video stream using the Android VideoView's standard methods:

videoView.setVideoURI(Uri.parse("rtsp://192.168.1.13:8888/test"));
try {
 videoView.start();
 }
catch (Exception ex) {
 ex.printStackTrace();
}

Everything works fine, but the connection to the camera takes too long. It takes about 5-7 seconds (too long for my needs) before video starts playing.

Is there any way to speed up the connection time?

Answer 1

Finally found a solution. The problem was that Android' MediaPlayer, that is a part of VideoView, has fixed buffer size that cannot be changed. So i used Google' ExoPlayer, which provides such feature. Making buffer size smaller resolved my problem.

P.S. Maintaining the resource/connection with VideoView.suspend() or VideoView.pause() to resume stream later doesn't make a thing.