Can't play Video in Sony Xperia

Report · Feb 03, 2013

This is extremely weird. I deploy my Adobe AIR app as an .apk for my Xperia and everything works fine EXCEPT playing videos.

I have tried flash.media.Video (NetStream, NetConnect etc). I get the video to play fine in the Desktop simulator. If I try to play video on the mobile device (Sony Xperia Arc S) I get a black screen!

I have managed to narrow down the source of the problem: as soon as this piece of code is encountered:

"new Video()" (yes, exactly as you see it here, nothing more, nothing less!)

the app's screen (all of it) goes black! I can still hear the music playing as well as the sound effects, but I get a completely black screen!

Occasionaly, I get a glance of the video's first frame before the screen goes black.

Trying to hack around this problem, I embedded my video as a MovieClip. However, as soon as I create an instance of the embedded MovieClip, the screen goes black again.

Finally, I have tried playing a video with the StageVideo class, but as soon as this piece of code is encountered:

"stage.addEventListener(StageVideoAvailabilityEvent.STAGE_VIDEO_AVAILABILITY, onStageVideoState);"

again, I get a black screen on the mobile (on the desktop, I simply get a "StageVideo not available" message or something like that).

I haven't had the chance to try on another device. Is it my mobile? Is it Xperia? Is it AIR?

PS. I have tried Air 3.4 and 3.5, both in Flash Builder and Flash CS6 with exactly the same results.

PS2. Anything else to hack my way through? (StageWebView is rejected because I need to show my stuff above the video)

Report · Mar 22, 2013

That is just a hunch:

When i had the "can hear sound, cant see video" situation for videos in stageWebView, it was fixed by turning on the hardware acceleration in the app-descriptor.xml.

<manifestAdditions><![CDATA[

....

After that, videos worked fine.

On Xperia, sometimes youtube videos were still cropped and the background flickert sometimes.

XPeria is a troublemaker, most "AIR-bugs" i experienced are exclusively found on this stupid device.

V.

Report · Mar 26, 2013

Thank you so much for your reply. I have tried what you suggest but have had no luck.

It's hard to believe that only Xperia devices have this problem. I mean, the result is that the whole app simply isn't functional..!

Report · Mar 27, 2013

I don't know if we have this device in our department, but if you get a chance, please open a new bug report on this over at bugbase.adobe.com. When adding the bug, please include a sample project / application so we can quickly test this out internally. If you'd like to keep this private, feel free to email the attachment to me directly (ccampbel@adobe.com).

Once added, please post back with the URL so that others effected can add their comments and votes.

Report · Jun 18, 2013

Hi Chris, I have come across many posts like this one here and elsewhere on the web, new Video() does cause the issue and I have tried the code with Adobe 4.6 and Apache 4.9.1 flex SDK's with combinations and ASC2 standalone AIR SDKs ranging from 3.5-3.8. My bug report has a snippet of code I compiled with Flash Develop on Windows 7 x64 machine.

Tried all the solutions/workarounds I came across without much success. Decompiled the apk and looked at the manifest, found <containsVideo>false</containsVideo>. Googled it found very little other than a release note for AIR 3.5. Checked online docs and couldn't find any reference/information on it. Could you please get that sorted? It'd have saved me several days of stress, hopefully will prevent anyone else running into the problem. Is there any reason the default is not true? Is there a performance cost?

Here is a link to my bug report:

https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3578045

Report · Nov 06, 2013

Hi Guys

I was also struggling with this issue. on Samsung S2 and Tablet Galaxy (WSVGA)

Make sure you have inside your <android> tag, <containsVideo>false</containsVideo>.

I also use - <application android:enabled="true" android:hardwareAccelerated="true"> and <activity android:launchMode="singleTop">. Just in case that also has an effect.

Works like a charm..