How to play a video from resources

As am getting lots of good feedback on my answer on SO for the question How to play a video from the raw or assets folder, I thought of writing this small tutorial on playing a video in your activity.

So, say you want to create a splash activity that will show an mp4 video that you stored in your raw directory which is usually located in your projects's res. Usually, the directory raw is not there, so just create one there. Add your splash video to the raw folder: In my case, it is splash.mp4

In your splash activity create the function splashPlayer():

public void splashPlayer() {
 VideoView videoHolder = new VideoView(this);
 setContentView(videoHolder);
 Uri video = Uri.parse("android.resource://" + getPackageName() + "/"
    + R.raw.splash);
 videoHolder.setVideoURI(video);
 videoHolder.setOnCompletionListener(new OnCompletionListener() {
  public void onCompletion(MediaPlayer mp) {
   jumpMain(); //jump to the next Activity
  }
 });
 videoHolder.start();
}

In the previous code the function jumpMain() will probably jump you to the next activity. If you want to give the user the option to cancel your video/splash, add the following line to the end of splashPlayer():

videoHolder.setOnTouchListener(new OnTouchListener() {
 @Override
 public boolean onTouch(View v, MotionEvent event) {
  ((VideoView)v).stopPlayback();
  jumpMain();
  return true;
 }
});

Finally, in your onCreate() function call this splashPlayer():

@Override
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
 super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
 splashPlayer();
}

An extra step would be to surround the splashPlayer() call in your onCreate() with a try...catch block. My personal experience shows that not all videos are playable on all devices even if they are mp4 videos. If this is the case, an exception is thrown and you can for example show an image instead. In this example I will only jump to the next Activity by calling jumpMain(), so my onCreate looks something like this:

@Override
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
 super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
 try {
  splashPlayer();
 } catch(Exception ex) {
  jumpMain();
 }
}

Do not forget to call finish() in your jumpMain() and enjoy!

 Here is the full SplashActivity (I am just showing the general idea so feel free to notify me of errors or bugs)

public class ActivitySplash extends Activity {

 @Override
 public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
  super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
  try {
   splashPlayer();
  } catch (Exception ex) {
   jumpMain();
  }
 }

 @Override
 public boolean onTouchEvent(MotionEvent ev) {
  return false;
 }

 public void splashPlayer() {
  VideoView videoHolder = new VideoView(this);
  setContentView(videoHolder);
  Uri video = Uri.parse("android.resource://" + getPackageName() + "/"
    + R.raw.splash);
  videoHolder.setVideoURI(video);
  videoHolder.setOnCompletionListener(new OnCompletionListener() {
   public void onCompletion(MediaPlayer mp) {
    jumpMain();
   }

  });
  videoHolder.start();
  videoHolder.setOnTouchListener(new OnTouchListener() {

   @Override
   public boolean onTouch(View v, MotionEvent event) {
    ((VideoView) v).stopPlayback();
    jumpMain();
    return true;
   }
  });
 }

 private synchronized void jumpMain() {
  Intent intent = new Intent(ActivitySplash.this, ActivityMain.class);
  startActivity(intent);
  finish();
 }
}