Move SurfaceView across Activities

Question

I'm working on a video app where user can watch a video, open it il fullscreen if needed and come back to default view and so on. I was using ExoPlayer and recently switch to default MediaPlayer due to the upcoming explanation.

I need to change "on the fly" the Surface of the player. I need to use the same player to display video among activities, with no delay to display the image. Using Exoplayer, the decoder wait for the next keyframe to draw pixels on the empty Surface.

So I need to use the same Surface so I don't need to push a new surface each time, just attachign the surface to a View parent. The Surface can stay the same but if I detach the SurfaceView to retrieve it from another activity and reattach it, the inner Surface is destroyed.

So is there a way to keep the same Surface across different activities ? With a Service ?

I know the question is a bit weird to understand, I will explain specified part is request in comment.

Answer 1

The Surface associated with a SurfaceView or TextureView will generally be destroyed when the Activity stops. It is possible to work around this behavior.

One approach is built into TextureView, and is described in the architecture doc, and demonstrated in the "double decode" activity in Grafika. The goal of the activity is to continue playing a pair of videos while the activity restarts due to screen rotation, not pausing at all. If you follow the code you can see how the return value from onSurfaceTextureDestroyed() is used to keep the SurfaceTexture alive, and how TextureView#setSurfaceTexture() attaches the SurfaceTexture to the new View. There's a bit of a trick to it -- the setSurfaceTexture() needs to happen in onCreate(), not onSurfaceTextureAvailable() -- but it's reasonably straightforward.

The example uses MediaCodec output for video playback, but it'll work equally well with anything that takes a Surface for output -- just create a Surface from the SurfaceTexture.

If you don't mind getting ankle-deep into OpenGL ES, you can just create your own SurfaceTexture, independent of Views and Activities, and render it yourself to the current SurfaceView. Grafika's "texture from camera" activity does this with live video from the camera (though it doesn't try to preserve it across Activity restarts).