Question

I am using pretty much the same code as the Camera app code from Google but am getting really weird results. Inside my application and the Camera app from Google the preview gets stuck or is overlid with weird lines. The preview is usually the last thing which I see in the phone’s own Camera app.

The Samsung model is I9003. The same code ran fine on I9000 which Samsung just discontinued. The code also works fine on an HTC Wildfire.

Any resolution for this?

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Just noticed that after taking a photo inside my application the camera preview becomes normal. Same thing is happening in the Google camera application.

Answer 1

Couldn’t post the answer earlier. Wasn’t sure if it was the right thing to do, but now with the app running properly on around 150 devices I guess this works.

So the Android camera app in its onCreate function had the following code:

         /*
         * To reduce startup time, we start the preview in another thread.
         * We make sure the preview is started at the end of onCreate.
         */
        Thread startPreviewThread = new Thread(new Runnable() {
            public void run() {
                try {
                    mStartPreviewFail = false;
                    startPreview();
                } catch (CameraHardwareException e) {
                    // In eng build, we throw the exception so that test tool
                    // can detect it and report it
                    if ("eng".equals(Build.TYPE)) {
                        throw new RuntimeException(e);
                    }
                    mStartPreviewFail = true;
                }
            }
        });
        startPreviewThread.start();

For some reason this did not work on GT-I9003. What I noticed was that after taking a photo the preview would come properly so there was nothing wrong with the hardware as such. I tried to retrace what was happening after a photo was taken and then compare it with the code with which the camera was first initialized. I commented out this code from onCreate. The onResume from the camera app looked like this:

if (mSurfaceHolder != null) {
   // If first time initialization is not finished, put it in the
   // message queue.
   if (!mFirstTimeInitialized) {
      mHandler.sendEmptyMessage(FIRST_TIME_INIT);
   } else {
      initializeSecondTime();
   }
}

I changed this to:

        if (!mFirstTimeInitialized) {
            initializeFirstTime();
        } else {
            initializeSecondTime();
        }

There were some other changes too, will put it up on GitHub as a separate app soon.