As the final recipe of this chapter, we will see how to play a movie with your Android application. Playing video, unlike playing audio, involves some special View elements for displaying it to the users.
For the last time, we will reuse the same project, and more specifically, we will play a video of Mario under the button for playing the Mario theme seen in the previous recipe.
- Add the following code to your
Main.axmlfile under theLayoutfile:<VideoView android:id="@+id/myVideoView" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="fill_parent"> </VideoView>
- As a result, the content of your
Main.axmlfile should look as follows:
- Add the following code to the
MainActivity.csclass in theOnCreate()method:var videoView = FindViewById<VideoView> (Resource.Id.SampleVideoView); var uri = Android.Net.Uri.Parse ("url of your video"); videoView.SetVideoURI (uri); - Finally, invoke the
videoView.Start();method.
As discussed in the introduction to this recipe, playing a video should involve a special view to display it to users. This special view is named the VideoView element and should be used in the same way as the simple TextView element that we saw earlier in this book:
<VideoView android:id="@+id/myVideoView" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="fill_parent"> </VideoView>
As you can see in the previous code sample, you can apply the same parameters to the VideoView element as the TextView element, such as layout-based options.
The VideoView element, like the MediaPlayer class for audio, has a method to set the video URI, named SetVideoURI, and another one to start the video, named Start().
Chapter 10, Taking Advantage of the Android Platform, will expand on what you learned here about playing a video, notably by demonstrating how to use the camera and record video.