Android VideoView black screen

Question

I have been looking for a way to get rid of the nasty black initial screen on a VideoView before the start() method is run.

I have tried with background image on the

Answer 1

It's a little late for this answer, but maybe other users have the same problem and find this question..

I have dealt with it, by setting a BackgroundResource initially and then, when starting the video, i have set the background to an invisible color..

VideoView myView = findViewById(R.id.my_view);
myView.setBackgroundResource(R.drawable.some_resource);
// some stuff

// this is when starting the video
myView.setVideoUri(someUri);
// also set MediaController somewhere...
//...
// now set the backgroundcolor to be not visible (first val of Color.argb(..) is the alpha)
myView.setBackGroundColor(Color.argb(0, 0, 0, 0));
//...
myView.start();

Answer 2

For me setting the setZOrderOnTop did not completely remove the initial black frame while playing an mp4 video. It, however, did reduce the time for which the black frame appears. I wanted to remove the initial black frame completely, so I played around and found that seeking the video forward by 100ms did the trick for me.

As a note, I am using the video in a loop, so if you do not want to loop the video just remove
mp.isLooping = true

Following is the snippet which I used to fix the issue:

val path = "android.resource://" + packageName + "/" + R.raw.my_video
videoView.setVideoURI(Uri.parse(path))
videoView.setZOrderOnTop(true)
videoView.seekTo(100)
videoView.start()

videoView.setOnPreparedListener { mp ->
   videoView.setZOrderOnTop(false)
   mp.isLooping = true // Loops the video 
}

It would still be great if I get an exact explanation of why the above worked if someone finds it helpful.

Answer 3

None of the Above worked for me. In my case, onPrepared gets called BEFORE the black frame went away, so I would still see the black frame.

I needed a solution where the video appeared shortly after the first frame.

So what I did was set the VideoView alpha to 0 in xml:

android:alpha="0"

and then before I start the video I animate the alpha back to 1:

videoView.animate().alpha(1);
videoView.seekTo(0);
videoView.start();

alternatively, you can just post a delayed Runnable to set the alpha to 1, instead of animating it.

Answer 4

For people still looking for answer for this, calling VideoView.start() and VideoView.pause() in succession inside onPrepared worked for me. I know this may not be the ideal way of achieving this however it might be the one with minimal workaround required in the code. Hope this works for you too.

@Override
public void onPrepared(MediaPlayer mp) {
    mVideoView.start();
    mVideoView.pause();
}