Running the device suite for the first time surfaced a defect the unit tests
could not: FFmpeg's *_mediacodec wrappers do not fail on a device without a
hardware encoder. They quietly bind to the platform's software codec
(c2.android.hevc.encoder on the test emulator) and encode far slower than
libx264 or libx265 would, while still presenting as the fast path. A three
second 320x240 clip did not finish inside a three minute timeout.
The Fast tier now checks whether a hardware encoder actually exists for the
target codec, and falls back to libx264/libx265 on -preset veryfast when one
does not. That is both quicker and honest about what it is doing, and the
distinction between Fast and Best survives the fallback: veryfast against
medium, rather than both collapsing to the same slow path.
The routing itself was already correct. The capability probe rightly rejects
c2.android.* as software-only, so the job was correctly sent to FFmpeg -- the
test asserting Media3 was encoding an assumption about the machine it ran on.
It now derives its expectation from the device, so it means the same thing on
hardware with a real encoder and on an emulator without one.
Verified on an API 37 emulator: 17 of 17 instrumented tests pass in 4.2s,
against six minutes of timeouts before. 65 unit tests still pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
JMR-devandClaude Opus 5
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