Question

I have a camera preview that I have successfully been able to take pictures from using Camera.takePicture().
However now I am adding a separate option to pause the preview on demand currently by simply calling camera.stopPreview() However I still want be able to capture what is on the screen (but not my controls, buttons etc).
Is there anyway of doing that or another way to pause/freeze the camera?

Answer 1

You can save the data returned in each call of the preview callback.

PreviewCallback pcb = new PreviewCallback() {
    public void onPreviewFrame(byte[] data, Camera arg1) {
        bitmap = BitmapFactory.decodeByteArray(data, 0, data.length);
        //bitmap is a static Bitmap
    }
}

I don’t know how much this will affect the frame rate before you call stopPreview().

After the stopPreview() call, bitmap contains the last frame that was captured.