Mark Godwin

I'm trying to essentially replicate the functionality of the latest YouTube app in the Android marketplace. When watching a video there's two separate layouts, one in portrait which provides additional info, and one in landscape which provides a full screen view of the video.

YouTupe app in portrait mode

YouTube app in landscape mode

(Sorry for the randomness of the photos, but they were the first pics I could find of the actual layout)

This is pretty easy to do normally - just specify an alternate layout in layout-land and all will be good. The thing that the YouTube app does really well (and what I'm trying to replicate) is that on orientation change, the video continues playing and doesn't have to re-buffer from the beginning.

I've figured out that overriding onConfigurationChange() and setting new LayoutParameters will allow me to resize the video without forcing a rebuffer - however the video will randomly scale to different widths/heights when rotating the screen multiple times. I've tried doing all sorts of invalidate() calls on the VideoView, tried calling RequestLayout() on the parent RelativeLayout container and just trying as many different things as I can, but I can't seem to get it to work properly. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Here's my code:

@Override
public void onConfigurationChanged(Configuration newConfig) {
    super.onConfigurationChanged(newConfig);
    if (newConfig.orientation == Configuration.ORIENTATION_LANDSCAPE) {
        questionText.setVisibility(View.GONE);
        respond.setVisibility(View.GONE);
        questionVideo.setLayoutParams(new RelativeLayout.LayoutParams(LayoutParams.FILL_PARENT, LayoutParams.FILL_PARENT));
    } else {
        questionText.setVisibility(View.VISIBLE);
        respond.setVisibility(View.VISIBLE);
        Resources r = getResources();
        int height = (int) TypedValue.applyDimension(TypedValue.COMPLEX_UNIT_DIP, 150.0f, r.getDisplayMetrics());
        questionVideo.setLayoutParams(new RelativeLayout.LayoutParams(LayoutParams.FILL_PARENT, height));
    }
}

EDIT: I've discovered in logcat some interesting output that comes up when my video is rotated which seems to be the culprit - although I have no idea how to fix it:

Logcat output when resizing properly (takes up entire window)

notice the h=726

12-13 15:37:35.468  1262  1270 I ActivityManager: Config changed: { scale=1.0 imsi=310/4 loc=en_US touch=3 keys=1/1/2 nav=1/1 orien=2 layout=34 uiMode=17 seq=210}
12-13 15:37:35.561  1262  1268 I TIOverlay: Position/X0/Y76/W480/H225
12-13 15:37:35.561  1262  1268 I TIOverlay: Adjusted Position/X1/Y0/W403/H225
12-13 15:37:35.561  1262  1268 I TIOverlay: Rotation/90
12-13 15:37:35.561  1262  1268 I Overlay : v4l2_overlay_set_position:: w=480 h=224
12-13 15:37:35.561  1262  1268 I Overlay : v4l2_overlay_set_position:: w=402 h=726
12-13 15:37:35.561  1262  1268 I Overlay : dumping driver state:
12-13 15:37:35.561  1262  1268 I Overlay : output pixfmt:
12-13 15:37:35.561  1262  1268 I Overlay : w: 432
12-13 15:37:35.561  1262  1268 I Overlay : h: 240
12-13 15:37:35.561  1262  1268 I Overlay : color: 7
12-13 15:37:35.561  1262  1268 I Overlay : UYVY
12-13 15:37:35.561  1262  1268 I Overlay : v4l2_overlay window:
12-13 15:37:35.561  1262  1268 I Overlay : window l: 1 
12-13 15:37:35.561  1262  1268 I Overlay : window t: 0 
12-13 15:37:35.561  1262  1268 I Overlay : window w: 402 
12-13 15:37:35.561  1262  1268 I Overlay : window h: 726

Logcat output when resizing incorrectly (takes up tiny portion of full screen)

notice the h=480

12-13 15:43:00.085  1262  1270 I ActivityManager: Config changed: { scale=1.0 imsi=310/4 loc=en_US touch=3 keys=1/1/2 nav=1/1 orien=2 layout=34 uiMode=17 seq=216}
12-13 15:43:00.171  1262  1268 I TIOverlay: Position/X0/Y76/W480/H225
12-13 15:43:00.171  1262  1268 I TIOverlay: Adjusted Position/X138/Y0/W266/H225
12-13 15:43:00.171  1262  1268 I TIOverlay: Rotation/90
12-13 15:43:00.179  1262  1268 I Overlay : v4l2_overlay_set_position:: w=480 h=224
12-13 15:43:00.179  1262  1268 I Overlay : v4l2_overlay_set_position:: w=266 h=480
12-13 15:43:00.179  1262  1268 I Overlay : dumping driver state:
12-13 15:43:00.179  1262  1268 I Overlay : output pixfmt:
12-13 15:43:00.179  1262  1268 I Overlay : w: 432
12-13 15:43:00.179  1262  1268 I Overlay : h: 240
12-13 15:43:00.179  1262  1268 I Overlay : color: 7
12-13 15:43:00.179  1262  1268 I Overlay : UYVY
12-13 15:43:00.179  1262  1268 I Overlay : v4l2_overlay window:
12-13 15:43:00.179  1262  1268 I Overlay : window l: 138 
12-13 15:43:00.179  1262  1268 I Overlay : window t: 0 
12-13 15:43:00.179  1262  1268 I Overlay : window w: 266 
12-13 15:43:00.179  1262  1268 I Overlay : window h: 480

Maybe someone knows what 'Overlay' is and why it's not getting the correct height value?

I had this problem, and I found that it was because in Rails 3 files in the lib/ directory aren't autoloaded. To diagnose, I added:

# application.rb
Delayed::Worker.destroy_failed_jobs = false

as mentioned by Ben W. This told me what was going on, as I could inspect the last_error.

So to solve the autoloading problem, I found a couple answers on SO, but the gist is adding this:

# application.rb

# Custom directories with classes and modules you want to be autoloadable.
# config.autoload_paths += %W(#{config.root}/extras)
config.autoload_paths += %W(#{config.root}/lib)
config.autoload_paths += Dir["#{config.root}/lib/**/"]

Which was kindly provided by http://hemju.com/2010/09/22/rails-3-quicktip-autoload-lib-directory-including-all-subdirectories/.

I'd be interested to see how you could solve this without turning on autoloading for the lib directory. Any thoughts?

I upgraded to Android SDK Tools r8 today and I can't seem to run the draw9patch tool. I'm getting the following error:

Exception in thread "AWT-EventQueue-0" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/jdesktop/swingworker/SwingWorker
at com.android.draw9patch.Application$1.run(Application.java:48)
at java.awt.event.InvocationEvent.dispatch(InvocationEvent.java:209)
at java.awt.EventQueue.dispatchEvent(EventQueue.java:633)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpOneEventForFilters(EventDispatchThread.java:296)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEventsForFilter(EventDispatchThread.java:211)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEventsForHierarchy(EventDispatchThread.java:201)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEvents(EventDispatchThread.java:196)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEvents(EventDispatchThread.java:188)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.run(EventDispatchThread.java:122)
Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.jdesktop.swingworker.SwingWorker
at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:202)
at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:190)
at sun.misc.Launcher$ExtClassLoader.findClass(Launcher.java:229)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:307)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:248)
... 9 more

I'm running snow leopard and have jre (or jdk?) 1.6.

Any ideas how to get this working? Thanks!

Rob,

The problem is that setBackgroundColor() is looking for a color object. So you would need to use something like the line below

ll.setBackgroundColor(Color.WHITE);

or

ll.setBackgroundColor(Color.parseColor("#ffffff"));

whereas setBackgroundResource is looking for a resource to use as the background, i.e. something in your res folder. You could use that to set the background to a drawable or something of that nature.

ll.setBackgroundResource(R.something.mydrawable);

I encountered this same problem. Turns out the android MediaPlayer won't handle redirects, so you have to find where the php script is redirecting you and give it the rtsp URL as Jeorgesys explained.

I was able to solve by performing a HttpGet and NOT following any redirects, then pulling the rtsp url from the 'Location' Http header. If you have multiple redirects, you'll have a little more trouble, but luckily in my case I only have to worry about a single redirect.

public static String resolveRedirect(String url) throws ClientProtocolException, IOException {
    HttpParams httpParameters = new BasicHttpParams();
    HttpClientParams.setRedirecting(httpParameters, false);

    HttpClient httpClient = new DefaultHttpClient(httpParameters);      
    HttpGet httpget = new HttpGet(url);
    HttpContext context = new BasicHttpContext();

    HttpResponse response = httpClient.execute(httpget, context);

    // If we didn't get a '302 Found' we aren't being redirected.
    if (response.getStatusLine().getStatusCode() != HttpStatus.SC_MOVED_TEMPORARILY)
        throw new IOException(response.getStatusLine().toString());

    Header loc[] = response.getHeaders("Location");
    return loc.length > 0 ? loc[0].getValue() : null;
}

I'm trying to post a video file to our server and monitor it's progress. I followed the steps outlined in Can't grab progress on http POST file upload (Android) and that worked great, but with larger files my program will hang while writing to the output socket and subsequently cause my phone to lock the WiFi so I can't turn it on/off and then cause it to crash (after a short period).

So I attempted to write my own HTTPClient and it works, but also with intermittent success, still falling victim to the random crashes of the method outlined above. It seems this only occurs on files > 5MB, but I've had it die around 1.3MB and I've even had it successfully transfer a 13MB file. The fact that it's so random and sporadic is infuriating but I'm convinced there's some reason it's happening.

Here's my connection code:

socket.connect(new InetSocketAddress(host, port));
socket.setSendBufferSize(1024 * 65);

int bytesSent = 0;
PrintStream out = new PrintStream(socket.getOutputStream());
out.print(headersBuffer);
out.print(bodyBuffer);
bytesSent += headersBuffer.length() + headersBuffer.length();
byte[] bytes = new byte[1024 * 65];
int size;
while ((size = fileStream.read(bytes)) > 0) {
    mListener.transferred(bytesSent);
    Log.i(TAG, "bytes sent: " + bytesSent);
    bytesSent += size;
    out.write(bytes, 0, size);       // Random freezes (/blocking?) on this line
    out.flush();
}

Log.i(TAG, "Made it!");
out.print(lastBoundary);
out.flush();

I've used the debugger to see where it's getting to in the stack when the write just seems to block and it's the OSNetworkSystem.writeSocketImpl() function. That function just never returns...

So my next thought was - if the socket will just sit there, perhaps I can interrupt it and force it to close so at least the phone doesn't crash and the user can retry... I read up on force closing sockets in Android here (since it seems there are some problems): http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?can=2&q=7933&colspec=ID%20Type%20Status%20Owner%20Summary%20Stars&id=7933

Basically what I did was create a Listener thread that looks at how many bytes have been transferred every 500ms and if there hasn't been a change, attempt to force close the socket by means of

socket.shutdownOutput();
socket.close();

However the socket returns that it is closed and everything proceeds to fail as outlined above.

Here's the general sequence of events in Logcat:

12-21 14:25:26.802  2234  2340 V UploadService: Bytes transferred: 5959800 of: 13191823
12-21 14:25:26.802  2234  2340 V UploadService: Bytes transferred: 5963896 of: 13191823
12-21 14:25:26.802  2234  2340 V UploadService: Bytes transferred: 5967992 of: 13191823
12-21 14:26:00.693  1262  1270 D WifiService: acquireWifiLockLocked: WifiLock{NetworkLocationProvider type=2 binder=android.os.Binder@45b48958}
12-21 14:26:11.083  1262  1289 D WifiHW  : 'DRIVER LINKSPEED' command timed out.
12-21 14:26:21.130  1262  1500 D WifiHW  : 'AP_SCAN 2' command timed out.
12-21 14:26:31.177  1262  1500 D WifiHW  : 'SCAN' command timed out.

And after a few minutes the really bad stuff starts happening and the phone crashes!

Please help! Thank you.

EDIT: Works great over 3G - I'm going to try at home and see if its some sort of router issue. However - how can I catch this problem and prevent the phone from crashing?

I was able to narrow down the problem to the onMeasure function in the VideoView class. By creating a child class and overriding the onMeasure function, I was able to get the desired functionality.

public class VideoViewCustom extends VideoView {

    private int mForceHeight = 0;
    private int mForceWidth = 0;
    public VideoViewCustom(Context context) {
        super(context);
    }

    public VideoViewCustom(Context context, AttributeSet attrs) {
        this(context, attrs, 0);
    }

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

    public void setDimensions(int w, int h) {
        this.mForceHeight = h;
        this.mForceWidth = w;

    }

    @Override
    protected void onMeasure(int widthMeasureSpec, int heightMeasureSpec) {
        Log.i("@@@@", "onMeasure");

        setMeasuredDimension(mForceWidth, mForceHeight);
    }
}

Then inside my Activity I just did the following:

@Override
public void onConfigurationChanged(Configuration newConfig) {
    super.onConfigurationChanged(newConfig);

    if (newConfig.orientation == Configuration.ORIENTATION_LANDSCAPE) {
        getWindow().clearFlags(WindowManager.LayoutParams.FLAG_FORCE_NOT_FULLSCREEN);
        getWindow().setFlags(WindowManager.LayoutParams.FLAG_FULLSCREEN, WindowManager.LayoutParams.FLAG_FULLSCREEN);

        questionVideo.setDimensions(displayHeight, displayWidth);
        questionVideo.getHolder().setFixedSize(displayHeight, displayWidth);

    } else {
        getWindow().setFlags(WindowManager.LayoutParams.FLAG_FORCE_NOT_FULLSCREEN, WindowManager.LayoutParams.FLAG_FORCE_NOT_FULLSCREEN);

        questionVideo.setDimensions(displayWidth, smallHeight);
        questionVideo.getHolder().setFixedSize(displayWidth, smallHeight);

    }
}

The line:

questionVideo.getHolder().setFixedSize(displayWidth, smallHeight);

is key in order to make this work. If you do the setDimensions call without this guy, the video still will not resize.

The only other thing you need to do is ensure that you call setDimensions() inside the onCreate() method as well or your video will not start buffering as the video won't be set to draw on a surface of any size.

// onCreate()
questionVideo.setDimensions(initialWidth, initialHeight); 

One last key part - if you ever find yourself wondering why the VideoView isn't resizing on rotation, you need to ensure the dimensions you're resizing to are either exactly equal to the visible area or less than it. I had a really big problem where I was setting the VideoView's width/height to the entire display size when I still had the notification bar/title bar on the screen and it was not resizing the VideoView at all. Simply removing the notification bar and title bar fixed the problem.

Hopefully this helps someone in the future!

While perhaps not the most elegant solution, I used static data members in my ActivityA class which I can set from ActivityB.

//ActivityA.class

public static boolean refreshData = false;

public void onResume() {
    if (refreshData) {
         mRefreshData();
         refreshData = false;
    }
}

//ActivityB.class

ActivityA.refreshData = true;
Intent myIntent = new Intent(v.getContext(), ActivityT.class);
startActivityForResult(myIntent, 0);

I'm interested to know if there's a better way to do this kind of thing!

I have three activities:

Activity A - Displays a list of data from a website. From this activity you can perform an action which would add something to this list (Activity B).

Activity B - This is the activity that adds data to the website. Upon successful completion this activity will need to tell Activity A to refresh its list.

Activity T - A TabHost which contains Activity A.

My problem is:

Activity B needs to tell Activity A to refresh, but its intent must be Activity T, since I want the TabHost to display Activity A.

//ActivityB.class
Intent myIntent = new Intent(v.getContext(), ActivityT.class);
myIntent.putExtra("target", "ActivityA");
myIntent.putExtra("refreshData", true);
startActivityForResult(myIntent, 0);

I thought I could use the TabHost as an intermediary and just pass the extras through to Activity A if they were set, like so:

//ActivityT.class
Bundle extras = getIntent().getExtras();

// Create an Intent to launch an Activity for the tab (to be reused)
intent = new Intent().setClass(this, ActivityA.class);

// Check to see if we want to pass our bundle through to the activity
if (extras != null && extras.getString("target").equals("activityA")) {
     intent.putExtras(extras);
}

// Initialize a TabSpec for each tab and add it to the TabHost
spec = tabHost.newTabSpec("Tab1").setIndicator("Tab1",
            res.getDrawable(R.drawable.ic_tab_tab1)).setContent(intent);
tabHost.addTab(spec);

This works great, except that when I change tabs to a different tab and change back, the extras are passed through yet again, and again - which causes my tab to refresh its data every time, even though I'm no longer coming from Activity B. This is because the TabActivity doesn't get recreated on tab change and therefore the extras are always passed through to the child intents.

So, how I can tell Activity A to refresh ONLY from Activity B, but still get the TabHost to show up?

I'm working on developing a native android application to retrieve data for a user from my company's website.

Because the data is specific to the user, I need to authenticate with our web server, but I'm unsure of the best way to go about this. I've been reading about REST/SOAP/HTML form auth, but I can't really find any definite 'this is how its done' anywhere. I know mobile apps do this kind of thing all the time - just look at facebook/skype/any email app - you have to login before you can do anything.

My question is - how should I architect the server side code (php) to easily allow me to authenticate a user from my android device?

I'm fairly new to the 'web service' arena - does this fall into that category? Are there any tutorials you guys would recommend looking at?

Thanks!