VideoView black flash before and after playing

Question

I have a VideoView which I want to use to play a movieclip. I use it like this to play it and it works.

VideoView vv = new VideoView(this);
vv.setVideoURI(Uri.parse("android.resource://cortex2.hcbj/raw/intro"));
setContentView(vv);
vv.start();

However I see a black flash just before and after the movie clip. The flash in itself isn't a big problem, but the blackness of it is. The background is white, so if the flash is white, or if it dissapears it will be okay.

Answer 1

Another solution that might work for people who are searching for this question:

In my case, the video was a resource in the app (that is, I knew everything about it and it wasn't going to change) and its last 500 ms were the same frame, so I ended up doing the following:

mVideoView.setVideoURI(Uri.parse("android.resource://" + getPackageName() + "/" + R.raw.splash));
mVideoView.start();

findViewById(android.R.id.content).postDelayed(new WaitForSplashScreenToFinish(), mVideoView.getDuration() - 1000);

and the referenced class is:

private class WaitForSplashScreenToFinish implements Runnable {
    @Override
    public void run() {
        if (mVideoView.isPlaying() && mVideoView.getCurrentPosition() >= mVideoView.getDuration() - 500) {
            mVideoView.pause();

            // Now do something else, like changing activity
        } else {
            findViewById(android.R.id.content).postDelayed(this, 100);
        }
    }
}

Explanation: Immediately after starting the video I create a Runnable and postDelayed it to the root view (android.R.id.content) to the duration of the video, minus the length at which I'm willing to pause the video (and a generous buffer, because postDelayed isn't guaranteed to play exactly after the requested time)

Then, the runnable checks if the video arrived at its pause-time, if so it pauses it and does whatever else we want it to do. If it doesn't, it runs postDelayed again with itself, for a shortened time (100 ms in my case, but could be shorter)

Granted, this is far from being an ideal solution, but it might help someone with a specific problem similar to the one that stumbled me for half a day :)

Answer 2

I know it's old question but if you can add some code to MediaPlayer listeners there is very simple answer. It turned out that setBackgroundColor for VideoView changes the foreground color ( https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/android-developers/B8CEC64qYhQ ).
So the only thing you have to do is switching between setBackgroundColor(Color.WHITE) and setBackgroundColor(Color.TRANSPARENT).