I am using ffmpeg compiled for android and works pretty acceptable for now, however sometimes errors appear (based on some android phone configurations) and the app simply force closes with this message:
Fatal signal 11 (SIGSEGV) at 0x00000001 (code=1), thread 20745 (AsyncTask #2)
The ffmpeg call is inside a try/catch; however, it does not seem to care.
So, how can I prevent this force close and show the user a message?
I'm afraid I can't do that. See also this answer which hints at why.
When ffmpeg dies, it takes with it your entire program. This is just the way things are. When programming in Java, you don't have to think about programs crashing in that manner, but when ffmpeg, which is written i C, dies, it can take down your entire Java program.
try/catch does not help, because ffmpeg does not know or care about Java exceptions. Your only solution while staying within a Java program, is to either find the bug which makes ffmpeg die, or find what triggers the bug and call ffmpeg in such a way that it does not crash. As pointed out by Alex Cohn, another solution is to run ffmpeg in another process, so that it can not take down anything else but its own process.
You can run ffmpeg not as a library, but as a separate executable process. This may be significantly less efficient, but in such setup your process may survive ffmpeg crash.
You can also setup your app such that it has Activity and Service that run in separate processes, see e.g. How to create an Android Activity and Service that use separate processes.
This allows for some watchdog mechanism, and more. I cannot tell without careful testing if this way can deliver better performance than running ffmpeg executable, or worse.
