Android Media Player Threading/Concurrency

Question

Hi all! I am using the default Android Media Player in an Activity, trying to play back a couple of video files. However I have a problem with programming what I want. The desired program outcome would be the following:

• A video file is played back
• After that, a dialog is shown, asking the user something
• A pause of 5 seconds occurs
• The next video is shown
• and so forth

How am I to program this? Currently, I use a paradigm like the following:

• I have a method that sets up the player for the a file, e.g. playVideo(int) So I pass it the first file.
• When the player is prepared, it will be started in onPrepared(MediaPlayer).
• When the video is finished, the onCompletion(MediaPlayer) listener of the media player shows the dialog to the user by calling showDialog().
• The user accepts the dialog. Before calling dismiss() on the dialog, the player object is started for the next file by calling playVideo(int).

This works, but it feels a bit quirky and not clean. And it's of course very procedural. The problems are:

• that I can't figure out how to insert a pause after the dialog is dismissed.
• that I maybe want to change the presentation order of dialogs and videos and this ain't too easy now

Has anyone got an idea?

Answer 1

For the pause, you could use the AlarmManager to schedule an alarm five seconds from now. It will launch an intent, and that intent could call playVideo(int).