VideoView black flash before and after playing

Question

I have a VideoView which I want to use to play a movieclip. I use it like this to play it and it works.

VideoView vv = new VideoView(this);
vv.setVideoURI(Ur         


        

Answer 1

I ended up having to do something very similar to @tommyd to avoid the black surfaceView flash at the beginning and end of my videos. However, I found that setting/nulling the background drawable for the videoView was not occurring instantly on many phones. There could be about a half-second delay between my call to set the background and when it was actually displayed.

What I ended up doing was creating a custom SurfaceView that showed a single, solid color, then overlayed this on top of the VideoView and made use of SurfaceView.setZOrderMediaOverlay().

My custom SurfaceView was heavily informed by: http://android-er.blogspot.com/2010/05/android-surfaceview.html

public class SolidSurfaceView extends SurfaceView implements SurfaceHolder.Callback {

    private static final String TAG = SolidSurfaceView.class.getSimpleName();

    private SolidSurfaceThread mThread;
    private boolean mSurfaceIsValid;
    private int mColor;

    public SolidSurfaceView(Context context) {
        super(context);
        init();
    }

    public SolidSurfaceView(Context context, AttributeSet attrs) {
        super(context, attrs);
        init();
    }

    public SolidSurfaceView(Context context, AttributeSet attrs, int defStyle) {
        super(context, attrs, defStyle);
        init();
    }

    private void init() {
        Log.verbose(TAG, "init");

        getHolder().addCallback(this);
        setZOrderMediaOverlay(true);
    }

    public void setColor(int color) {
        mColor = color;
        invalidate();
    }

    @Override
    public void surfaceCreated(SurfaceHolder holder) {
        Log.verbose(TAG, "surfaceCreated");

        mSurfaceIsValid = true;

        mThread = new SolidSurfaceThread(getHolder(), this);
        mThread.setRunning(true);
        mThread.start();
    }

    @Override
    public void surfaceDestroyed(SurfaceHolder holder) {
        Log.verbose(TAG, "surfaceDestroyed");
        mSurfaceIsValid = false;

        boolean retry = true;
        mThread.setRunning(false);
        while (retry) {
            try {
                mThread.join();
                retry = false;
            }
            catch (InterruptedException e) {
                Log.warning(TAG, "Thread join interrupted");
            }
        }
        mThread = null;
    }

    @Override
    protected void onDraw(Canvas canvas) {
        if ( ! mSurfaceIsValid) {
            return;
        }

        canvas.drawColor(mColor);
    }

    private static class SolidSurfaceThread extends Thread {

        private final SurfaceHolder mSurfaceHolder;
        private final SolidSurfaceView mSurfaceView;
        private boolean mIsRunning;

        public SolidSurfaceThread(SurfaceHolder surfaceHolder, SolidSurfaceView surfaceView) {
            mSurfaceHolder = surfaceHolder;
            mSurfaceView = surfaceView;
        }

        public void setRunning(boolean running) {
            mIsRunning = running;
        }

        @Override
        public void run() {
            while (mIsRunning) {
                Canvas c = null;
                try {
                    c = mSurfaceHolder.lockCanvas(null);
                    synchronized (mSurfaceHolder) {
                        mSurfaceView.onDraw(c);
                    }
                }
                finally {
                    // do this in a finally so that if an exception is thrown
                    // during the above, we don't leave the Surface in an
                    // inconsistent state
                    if (c != null) {
                        mSurfaceHolder.unlockCanvasAndPost(c);
                    }
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

And in the parent activity that hosts the views:

    mVideoView = (VideoView)findViewById(R.id.video_view);
    mVideoMask = (SolidSurfaceView)findViewById(R.id.video_mask);
    mVideoMask.setColor(Color.BLUE);

You can then do things like mVideoMask.setVisibility(View.GONE) to hide the mask or mVideoMask.setVisibility(View.VISIBLE) to show the mask (and hide the black-screened VideoView).

In my experiments on various phones, this method provided very fast showing/hiding of the video mask, as opposed to setting/nulling the background.