I would like to know how does Snapchat and/or Instagram capture they videos.
I'm currently working on an android (Kotlin) application where I'm showing a preview of my front camera and at the same time I'm displaying some kind of filters on it.
I've tried to capture the whole screen where I'm displaying the preview but all i got is a black screen and the elements of the view.
I've also tried to record a video but, obviously, the filters are not appearing there.
I've tried things like mediaRecorder, Pixelcopy... but still haven't figured it out what is the correct approach.
I am building an app with Goodbarber, an app builder that allows users with no IT development skills like me to build native apps.
I am contacting you because I have a problem with my native Android application:
Screen rotation is not possible as soon as I'm on the native app. This is a problem for me because I would like to allow my users to put the youtube videos present in the application in full screen. I think the fact that the rotation is not possible, it blocks the full screen of youtube videos (the full screen icon is not clickable)
When I test the app in Progressive Web App, no problem. I can put its videos in full screen (the full screen icon is clickable and the full screen is displayed in 16-9).
I have already tested several codes such as for example:
put a in the to change the orientation of the screen (without success)
put '' allowfullscreen '' in the (without success, even with allowfullscreen = "allowfullscreen")
Would you have a solution for me as I can't find any code that helps me?
Thanks for your help.
There are some parameters to test, I think you don't need "allowfullscreen" or stuff like that, rather orientation definitions:
Go into your AndroidManifest.xml and change android:screenOrientation="landscape" to android:screenOrientation="sensorLandscape" or that one you want from the parameter list.
For further fullscreen option take a look at this documentation.
Good luck buddy! :)
I am trying to take a screenshot of my android device programmatically.
I have found dozens of Questions and posts, years old and not current. For example:
How to programmatically take a screenshot on Android?
The Approach works in the way of taking a screenshot of my main application window. But I I want to take a screenshot of the whole device including other apps!
example:
Instead of the "Internal Storage" + Control overlay, the original app is recorded or alternatively, the tiny view of the control overlay.
Anyone an idea on how to record the current screen? I'm fairly sure there must be solutions as there are apps out there such as the following screen recorder:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=videoeditor.videorecorder.screenrecorder&hl=en
I have doing a basic object detection on the camera preview screen in Android (greater than 3.2). For the devices which do not support processing on preview screen, I am buffering the preview screen, processing it and clearing the buffer. This part is working as desired.
What I now want is this app to run in the background while any other app is running in the foreground. I am using android service and am able to run a small test app in the background. However my concern is with the camera preview app.
I don't want to display the preview screen but use the preview screen information for processing. This might be too much to ask, but I wanted to know if this is even possible. I came across this link which shows some hope. Basically I want to process the video (preview) stream without displaying it on the screen. If this is doable, then I can think of putting this app in the background and some other app in the foreground.
Unfortunately I won't be able to share the code, however it is the standard logic of creating a surface view and starting the preview.
I would really appreciate any insight into this.
Check comments here.Basically he opens camera hardware, set preview callback and do startpreview without setting the previewDisplay (this might not work on every device). You can try this from your background service. All this will work if your foreground doesn't access the camera app. Please update this if it works. I am interested to know.
I want to write an activity that:
Shows the camera preview (viewfinder), and has a "capture" button.
When the "capture" button is pressed, takes a picture and returns it to the calling activity (setResult() & finish()).
Are there any complete examples out there that works on every device? A link to a simple open source application that takes pictures would be the ideal answer.
My research so far:
This is a common scenario, and there are many questions and tutorials on this.
There are two main approaches:
Use the android.provider.MediaStore.ACTION_IMAGE_CAPTURE event. See this question
Use the Camera API directly. See this example or this question (with lots of references).
Approach 1 would have been perfect, but the issue is that the intent is implemented differently on each device. On some devices it works well. However, on some devices you can take a picture but it is never returned to your app. On some devices nothing happens when you launch the intent. Typically it also saves the picture to the SD card, and requires the SD card to be present. The user interaction is also different on every device.
With approach 2 the issues is stability. I tried some examples, but I've managed to stop the camera from working (until a restart) on some devices and completely freeze another device. On another device the capture worked, but the preview stayed black.
I would have used ZXing as an example application (I work with it a lot), but it only uses the preview (viewfinder), and doesn't take any pictures. I also found that on some devices, ZXing did not automatically adjust the white balance when the lighting conditions changed, while the native camera app did it properly (not sure if this can be fixed).
Update:
For a while I used the camera API directly. This gives more control (custom UI, etc), but I would not recommend it to anyone. I would work on 90% of devices, but every now and again a new device would be released, with a different problem.
Some of the problems I've encountered:
Handling autofocus
Handling flash
Supporting devices with a front camera, back camera or both
Each device has a different combination of screen resolution, preview resolutions (doesn't always match the screen resolution) and picture resolutions.
So in general, I'd not recommend going this route at all, unless there is no other way. After two years I dumped by custom code and switched back to the Intent-based approach. Since then I've had much less trouble. The issues I've had with the Intent-based approach in the past was probably just my own incompetence.
If you really need to go this route, I've heard it's much easier if you only support devices with Android 4.0+.
With approach 2 the issues is stability. I tried some examples, but I've managed to stop the camera from working (until a restart) on some devices and completely freeze another device. On another device the capture worked, but the preview stayed black.
Either there is a bug in the examples or there is a compatibility issue with the devices.
The example that CommonsWare gave works well. The example works when using it as-is, but here are the issues I ran into when modifying it for my use case:
Never take a second picture before the first picture has completed, in other words PictureCallback.onPictureTaken() has been called. The CommonsWare example uses the inPreview flag for this purpose.
Make sure that your SurfaceView is full-screen. If you want a smaller preview you might need to change the preview size selection logic, otherwise the preview might not fit into the SurfaceView on some devices. Some devices only support a full-screen preview size, so keeping it full-screen is the simplest solution.
To add more components to the preview screen, FrameLayout works well in my experience. I started by using a LinearLayout to add text above the preview, but that broke rule #2. When using a FrameLayout to add components on top of the preview, you don't have any issues with the preview resolution.
I also posted a minor issue relating to Camera.open() on GitHub.
"the recommended way to access the camera is to open Camera on a separate thread". Otherwise, Camera.open() can take a while and might bog down the UI thread.
"Callbacks will be invoked on the event thread open(int) was called from". That's why to achieve best performance with camera preview callbacks (e.g. to encode them in a low-latency video for live communication), I recommend to open camera in a new HandlerThread, as shown here.