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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-17T23:54:36+00:00

I’ve found that after calling setRotation() on a VideoView, that VideoView no longer plays.

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I’ve found that after calling setRotation() on a VideoView, that VideoView no longer plays. No errors are thrown by the Android runtime, and the VideoView correctly determines its crop dimensions but only shows as a solid black box.

Is this a known limitation? If so is there another way to rotate VideoViews? I’m using API level 16.

Edit: The video plays audio, but no video. Perhaps the underlying SurfaceView isn’t being repositioned?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    To answer myself in case it helps somebody later, this is a known limitation of VideoView. Quote from this Android graphics blog post:

    Because a SurfaceView’s content does not live in the application’s window, it cannot be transformed (moved, scaled, rotated) efficiently. This makes it difficult to use a SurfaceView inside a ListView or a ScrollView. SurfaceView also cannot interact properly with some features of the UI toolkit such as fading edges or View.setAlpha().

    The only solution I could find was to replace the VideoView with the newly-introduced TextureView, which is only available in API level 14 and above. From what I read it is not currently available in the compatibility library. This question has an example of how to use a TextureView to play video, it’s pretty easy and all you lose is the convenience of a VideoView wrapping a MediaPlayer for you.

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