Zapp gives you easy access to a large number of German public broadcasting live streams. Watch ARD, ZDF and other channels live. Zapp makes it easy to quickly switch between channels.
The are multiple reasons why the streams won't play on Android:
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Maybe you are using Zapp outside of Germany. Some channels may block access to their streams or to single shows for users outside of Germany. When in doubt head the the channels website (using a desktop) and check out the live stream there. If you get an error message about geoblocking there, Zapp can't do anything about it right now.
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Maybe your internet connection is wonky or blocked by a firewall.
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Maybe you Android device can't handle the video codec. You can share the stream to another video player by pressing the menu button after selecting a channel. Click "Teilen" and let Google Video Player open the stream. If Google Video Player is not able to play back the stream your device most likely cannot handle the video format.
Most channels don't have any public API to get EPG data from. So Zapp tries to parse channel websites for the shows currently running. This approach is not very reliable and may break whenever the websites change or update.
ARTEs otherwise excellent API does not return the shows start and end time or progress so Zapp can't display it.
Zapp does only stream public broadcasting channels. Channels like RTL and Pro7 are owned by private companies and are not allowed to be streamed without paying for them.
Zapp uses a lot of awesome open source libraries:
- JUnit to test things out
- Gson to parse the list of channels
- Commons IO for a sane way to handle files on Android
- Paperboy to easily display a nice looking changelog
- DragListView to let you reorder the channel list intuitively
- Butterknive to avoid writing a lot of boilerplate code