Taking picture from non-activity

Question

I am using dummy surface in my code.It\'s working fine in Canvas HD running 4.2.1 but when the same app is deployed on my nexus 5/S 3 it gives RunTimeException on camera.tak

Answer 1

You can use a dummy SurfaceTexture instead of a SurfaceView. This is reliable and works fine on the old camera API:

mDummyTexture = new SurfaceTexture(1); // pick a random argument for texture id
mCamera.setPreviewTexture(mDummyTexture);
mCamera.startPreview();
mCamera.takePicture(...);

Just make sure to keep mDummyTexture as a member of your class, or you may get abandoned surface errors.

As long as you don't call SurfaceTexture#updateTexImage(), you do not need an OpenGL context.