How to get Android camera preview data?

Question

My camera app displays a camera preview on the screen and also processes it in the background. Here is the relevant code, condensed as much as possible (e.g. no error handling

Answer 1

The only problem was that I didn't set the preview width and height:

params.setPreviewSize(previewWidth, previewHeight);
mCamera.setParameters(params);

This meant that the height and width I allocated for the array (proportional to previewWidth * previewHeight) tended to be a lot larger than the size of the actual data being returned (proportional to the default preview width and preview height). On some phones, the default was the same size as previewWidth and previewHeight, so there was no issue.