You can have multiple SurfaceViewsin one layout. The “Multi-surface test” activity in Grafika has three. The first post cited in @nonsleepr’s answer was followed up 9 months later with this post by the same author, which mentioned the existence of SurfaceView#setZOrderMediaOverlay(). The key thing to understand is that SurfaceView is not a regular view. When … Read more
The Activity and the View are created at essentially the same time. The Surface is created later, and that’s what the SufaceHolder callbacks are for. You can’t render on the Surface before it exists or after it’s destroyed, so there’s no point in starting your rendering thread before then or leaving it running after. The … Read more
The easy solution is to simply kill and restart the thread. Create methods resume() – creates thread object and starts it – and pause() – kills thread (see Lunarlander example) – in your SurfaceView class and call these from surfaceCreated and surfaceDestroyed to start and stop the thread. Now in the Activity that runs the … Read more
Resizing a Bitmap: public Bitmap getResizedBitmap(Bitmap bm, int newHeight, int newWidth) { int width = bm.getWidth(); int height = bm.getHeight(); float scaleWidth = ((float) newWidth) / width; float scaleHeight = ((float) newHeight) / height; // create a matrix for the manipulation Matrix matrix = new Matrix(); // resize the bit map matrix.postScale(scaleWidth, scaleHeight); // recreate … Read more
First, remove source of crashes: startPreviewCamera called in onResume. Camera preview shall be started in SurfaceHolder.Callback methods. Then you should know that you can set preview size only to sizes reported by Camera.Parameters.getSupportedPreviewSizes. And these sizes will most likely be smaller or equal to device’s screen size. Then you simply call Camera.Parameters p = camera.getParameters(); … Read more
Ok, I know this is very late as an answer but it is possible. Below is code from the Android SDK sample. To see the rest of the code to implement this download the android sdk samples and go to Samples/android-10(one I used, could try whichever you want to target)/ApiDemos/src/com/example/android/apis/graphics/CameraPreview.java class PreviewSurface extends ViewGroup implements … Read more
Once you start using a SurfaceView, you are moving yourself into a world where you have a blank area of pixels, and you are on your own to draw them how you want. You do everything yourself – and that means you need to implement scrolling yourself as well. It’s not trivial to do, but … Read more
Great question. Quick bit of background for anyone else reading this: The goal here is to minimize the display latency, i.e. the time between when the app renders a frame and when the display panel lights up the pixels. If you’re just throwing content at the screen, it doesn’t matter, because the user can’t tell … Read more
Edit: if the targetSDK is greater than 10, putting the app to sleep calls onPause and onStop. Source I looked at the lifecycle of both the Activity and the SurfaceView in a tiny camera app on my gingerbread phone. You are entirely correct; the surface is not destroyed when the power button is pressed to … Read more
Here are some definitions: A Surface is an object holding pixels that are being composited to the screen. Every window you see on the screen (a dialog, your full-screen activity, the status bar) has its own surface that it draws in to, and Surface Flinger renders these to the final display in their correct Z-order. … Read more