Can't play video VideoView Android 12 (error (1, -2147483648))
I have an app with a VideoView to display an MP4 file. Everything was working perfectly fine, on all devices and all Android versions, until Android 12.
We have one user reporting that the VideoView is unable to play the videos, for every video he gets the following popup (the app doesn't crash, just this popup is shown):
My question: does anyone know what the problem might be? I'm expecting - or hoping - it has to do with the fact that it's the beta version of Android 12. If that's not the case, then how can I solve this issue? Anything that changed for Android 12 w.r.t. displaying videos?
Many thanks.
EDIT: The video files are located in local storage (R.raw folder)
EDIT 2: When running the emulator with Android 12, I get the MediaPlyaer error (1, -2147483648). This corresponds to MediaPlayer.MEDIA_ERROR_UNKNOWN and UNKNOWN_ERROR respectively, as explained in this SO post. However, the proposed solutions there don't solve the problem here (the format should not be the issue, since they are .mp4 files). Any ideas?
EDIT 3: I submitted an issue with Google about this. If you're interested in a solution, star it here. Hope we can find the cause soon!
What fixed it was saving the video in AVC/H264 format and using that file.
From reporting this issue on Google's Issuetracker here, it turned out that the problem was actually with the encoding of the video files in this case. The video that wasn't playing was encoded in MPEG-4 format (.mp4) and exceeded the capabilities of the MPEG-4 software decoder.
I don't know why this wasn't an issue before Android 12 (videos were playing fine before), but at least this does fix the issue.