Loading a video (mp4) file in android

Question

     VideoView v = (VideoView) findViewById(R.id.VideoView01);
     Uri uri = Uri.parse("android.resource://" + getPackageName() + "vid.mp4");
     mc = new MediaController(this);
     v.setMediaController(mc);
     v.setVideoURI(uri);
     v.start();

An alertbox appears saying that the video cannot be played.Do you have a solution to this .

thanks in advance

Answer 1

This is a linux filesystem permission issue. The location of the file is solely owned by your application. The MediaPlayer service ViewView relies on runs as a different "user" from a file system perspective.

The way I've solved this in the past is to create a custom VideoView extending SurfaceView that takes a FileDiscriptor as it's data source .

This side steps the issue by providing a connection to the data the is already open as far as the file system is concerned.

If your feeling frisky you could pull down the VideoView code from google and add a new setVideoFileDiscriptor method.