Playing .MP4 video from raw resource folder

Question

I've seen a number of similar questions, but so far I've not been able to get anything working.

I'm trying to playback a video (.MP4) from the res/raw folder and only get audio, no video. The video is short (about 3 seconds), small (350KB) and if I put the video on the device (Motorola Droid) directly, it plays fine. It also plays fine if I modify the app to read it from the SD card rather than the resource folder. The behavior is the same on both the emulator and the actual device.

Unfortunately, I need this video to be an intro shown just prior to the main screen for my app, so it has to be part of the package. Additionally, one of the app requirements is that the app is available offline, so I can't stream from a web server. I've tried a VideoView, SurfaceView and MediaPlayer, none of them work.

Is it possible to playback video from the resource folder? I've read something about compression possibly screwing the video up, is it possible to manually decompress the video and then play it, and if so, how would that work? This seems like it should be a pretty basic operation, am I just missing something?

Answer 1

I was having the same trouble, tried everything too, agree it should be easier... and documented. Just fixed by passing VideoView.setVideoUri a string with the android.resource protocol, as described here. The first option doesn't work for me, but the second does:
Uri uri = Uri.parse("android.resource://[package]/"+R.raw.[video_resid]);
Hopefully works for you too.