Rotating an Android Videoview

Is it possible to rotate an Android VideoView?

In this discussion, Les Vogel (from Google) writes:

No

And as far as I can tell this is the only valid answer as of today.

The Media Effects framework mentioned in the other answer does not appear to apply to video.

How to rotate the video to landscape mode on button click?

You can just set the screen orientation.

Button button = (Button) findViewById(R.id.button);
button.setOnClickListener(new Button.OnClickListener(){
    @Override
    public void onClick(View arg0) {
           //This line will set the orientation to landscape. 
          setRequestedOrientation(ActivityInfo.SCREEN_ORIENTATION_LANDSCAPE);
    }
}

You just need to use the values from the ACTIVITYINFO class.

Resources

ActivityInfo: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/pm/ActivityInfo.html#SCREEN_ORIENTATION_LANDSCAPE

Landscape: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/pm/ActivityInfo.html#SCREEN_ORIENTATION_LANDSCAPE

Portrait: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/pm/ActivityInfo.html#SCREEN_ORIENTATION_PORTRAIT

Android VideoView orientation change with buffered video

EDIT: (June 2016)

This answer is very old (I think android 2.2/2.3) and probably is not as relevant as the other answers below! Look to them first unless you're dev-ing on legacy Android :)

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I was able to narrow down the problem to the onMeasure function in the VideoView class. By creating a child class and overriding the onMeasure function, I was able to get the desired functionality.

public class VideoViewCustom extends VideoView {

    private int mForceHeight = 0;
    private int mForceWidth = 0;
    public VideoViewCustom(Context context) {
        super(context);
    }

    public VideoViewCustom(Context context, AttributeSet attrs) {
        this(context, attrs, 0);
    }

    public VideoViewCustom(Context context, AttributeSet attrs, int defStyle) {
        super(context, attrs, defStyle);
    }

    public void setDimensions(int w, int h) {
        this.mForceHeight = h;
        this.mForceWidth = w;

    }

    @Override
    protected void onMeasure(int widthMeasureSpec, int heightMeasureSpec) {
        Log.i("@@@@", "onMeasure");

        setMeasuredDimension(mForceWidth, mForceHeight);
    }
}

Then inside my Activity I just did the following:

@Override
public void onConfigurationChanged(Configuration newConfig) {
    super.onConfigurationChanged(newConfig);

    if (newConfig.orientation == Configuration.ORIENTATION_LANDSCAPE) {
        getWindow().clearFlags(WindowManager.LayoutParams.FLAG_FORCE_NOT_FULLSCREEN);
        getWindow().setFlags(WindowManager.LayoutParams.FLAG_FULLSCREEN, WindowManager.LayoutParams.FLAG_FULLSCREEN);

        questionVideo.setDimensions(displayHeight, displayWidth);
        questionVideo.getHolder().setFixedSize(displayHeight, displayWidth);

    } else {
        getWindow().setFlags(WindowManager.LayoutParams.FLAG_FORCE_NOT_FULLSCREEN, WindowManager.LayoutParams.FLAG_FORCE_NOT_FULLSCREEN);

        questionVideo.setDimensions(displayWidth, smallHeight);
        questionVideo.getHolder().setFixedSize(displayWidth, smallHeight);

    }
}

The line:

questionVideo.getHolder().setFixedSize(displayWidth, smallHeight);

is key in order to make this work. If you do the setDimensions call without this guy, the video still will not resize.

The only other thing you need to do is ensure that you call setDimensions() inside the onCreate() method as well or your video will not start buffering as the video won't be set to draw on a surface of any size.

// onCreate()
questionVideo.setDimensions(initialWidth, initialHeight); 

One last key part - if you ever find yourself wondering why the VideoView isn't resizing on rotation, you need to ensure the dimensions you're resizing to are either exactly equal to the visible area or less than it. I had a really big problem where I was setting the VideoView's width/height to the entire display size when I still had the notification bar/title bar on the screen and it was not resizing the VideoView at all. Simply removing the notification bar and title bar fixed the problem.

Hopefully this helps someone in the future!

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