Fighting With Surfaceview, Camera And Opengl

We've been fighting with some problems relating to SurfaceViews for more than a week, and find no proper solution to them. We read the other questions in the forum regarding to sim

Solution 1:

try this:

mLayout.addView(mRenderView);
mLayout.addView(mCustomSurfaceView);

// without this line, the camera preview cannot be displayed // when running activity at first time.
mCustomSurfaceView.setZOrderMediaOverlay(true);

this worked for me :)

Solution 2:

I had the same problem. As you hint at yourself: multiple SurfaceViews don't get along with each other in that their Z order is undefined.

On my Samsung Galaxy S2 the ordering is the same as you describe (don't know how it is on other phones). The way I solved this, is checking for first time creation of the Activity in onCreate():

@Override
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState)
{
    super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);

    //...

    if ( savedInstanceState == null )
    {
        initCamView();
        initOpenGL();
    }
    else
    {
        initOpenGL();
        initCamView();
    }

    //...
}

with:

privatevoidinitOpenGL()
{
    mGLSurfaceView = new GLSurfaceView(this);
    mGLSurfaceView.setEGLConfigChooser(8, 8, 8, 8, 16, 0);
    mGLSurfaceView.getHolder().setFormat(PixelFormat.TRANSLUCENT);

    mOGLRenderer = new OGLRenderer(this);
    mGLSurfaceView.setRenderer(mOGLRenderer);
    mRL.addView(mGLSurfaceView); // mRL is the Relative Layout
}

and:

privatevoidinitCamView()
{
    mCamView = new CustomCameraView( this.getApplicationContext(),
                                     this.getWindowManager() );
    mRL.addView(mCamView); // mRL is the Relative Layout
}

Not the most elegant solution, but it's better than letting the thread sleep for 4.6 seconds.

It might also be possible to just lock the screen in a single orientation, but then you need to do a lot of ugly hacking to get the overlays rotated the right way.

Or, if you're only targeting Android 3.0 or above (API level 8), you can just show the camera in an OpenGL SurfaceTexture. http://developer.android.com/reference/android/hardware/Camera.html#setPreviewTexture(android.graphics.SurfaceTexture)

Solution 3:

Each SurfaceView's surface has a Z-depth. There are three possible depths: the default (bottom), "media overlay" (above it), and "top" (which is above everything, including the View-based UI). If you have two overlapping surfaces at the same depth, one will win, but you can't reliably define which one. You might get consistent behavior on one device only to find that it works the other way on a different device.

The composition is done with hardware overlays, when possible. Many currently-popular devices have 4 overlay planes. Once you exceed that, the composition is done with the GPU, which is going to be more expensive. If you have a status bar, navigation bar, and View UI, that's three, so you only get one SurfaceView for cheap.

For the example in the question, it would be best to combine as many things as possible onto the surface being rendered with GLES. This can include camera output on API 11+. See the "Texture from Camera" activity in Grafika for an example. (Grafika also has a demo app with three overlapping SurfaceViews; see the "multi-surface test" activity.)

If you'd like to know more about why SurfaceView behaves the way it does, see the Android System-Level Graphics doc.

Solution 4:

I had the same problem: I wanted a SurfaceView under a GLSurfaceView, the first to play video and the second to run a game.

Whatever I did, the z order between these 2 surface views appears to be random.

But I found the solution, thanks to this post: https://stackoverflow.com/a/6028907/1557915

The trick is to remove the use of layout, but instead use setContentView/addContentView.