Although there is a controversy on this subject, more and more people watch films on their smartphone, thanks to applications such as Netflix, Disney + or Prime Video; The experience may not be like that of a television, but on the other hand, the mobile screens improve and the wireless headphones offer higher audio quality. In the same way, applications like Spotify are mainly mobile.
However, something that many people may not know that All these multimedia applications have several obstacles function properly; And it's not as easy as just reading the video via the screen or the audio file via the speakers.
When an Android application must reproduce any type of multimedia file, use SO audio and video codecs to decode the content; The problem is that You cannot directly access these codecs, for security reasons. Codecs have always been the favorite method of pirates to enter an operating system, using all kinds of techniques such as modified files. Google learned it for The Bad, with StageFright, a guy who attacks the Android multimedia system, who had a monolithic design in which all the components, including codecs, had access to many operating system permits.
Therefore, now Android has an independent process system that runs each time an application must reproduce a multimedia file. For example, codecs now They present themselves in their own independent process and separated from the rest of the system, which adds a lot of security; The problem is that it also adds complications and ineffectiveness, because each transfer of multimedia data requires a CPU call. This means that multimedia applications consume many resources on Android, and that's what Google wants to change.
As they discovered Android authorityof Android 16, multimedia codecs They can be executed in the application process This needs it, instead of working separately in your own process. In this way, when the application needs a codec to reproduce a video or a song, you can run it directly in its process and without making additional calls to the processor.
In practice, this should result in a Improvement of performance and reduction in battery consumption When we use multimedia applications, including Netflix and Spotify aforementioned, but also applications such as YouTube or reproduce musical files in local memory. According to Google's filtered presentation, the company's objective with this change was to improve performance with the AAC audio codec, after discovering that 50% of CPU cycles were dedicated to this type of unnecessary calls.
The good news is that this change will not be able to reopen the old security holes, because Google will force the developers of application to create these codecs in a safe language for memory as rust.
