Question

I am creating an application with frame by frame animation using almost 150 image frames. The animation is played by changing the background image of an Image view using Handler. Inside the handler I am retrieving the images from the folder /mnt/sdcard/Android/data/ApplicationPackage and changing it dynamically as the image view background by the following way :

FileInputStream in;                       
in = new FileInputStream(mFrames.get(imgpos));                              
bitmap  = BitmapFactory.decodeStream(in); 
if (in != null)
{   
    in.close();
}

This creates some issues in decoding the file input stream since it takes a lot of time for some images to create the bitmap. Image file size is almost less than 40 KB for each images, but it takes different duration to decode the images from the external directory for the same size files. I have tried to sample the file size and load but it directly affects the image clarity. Can any one please suggest me what is the better way to load the images to a bitmap from the external folder and with the same duration for all the images?

Thanks, Tim

Answer 1

I think you must preload the bitmap before displaying them… Use an array of bitmap, and a background task that load all the images when entering your activity.
Your handler is absolutely not allowed to perform time-consuming tasks such as loading bitmaps !