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Video Player

Category Requires Version
Media API 21, Android 5.0 Lollipop 8

Overview

A multimedia component capable of playing videos. When the application is run, the VideoPlayer will be displayed as a rectangle on-screen. If the user touches the rectangle, controls will appear to play/pause, skip ahead, and skip backward within the video. The application can also control behavior by calling the Start, Pause, and SeekTo methods.

Video files should be in 3GPP (.3gp) or MPEG-4 (.mp4) formats. For more details about legal formats, see Android Supported Media Formats.

App Inventor for Android only permits video files under 1 MB and limits the total size of an application to 5 MB, not all of which is available for media (video, audio, and sound) files. If your media files are too large, you may get errors when packaging or installing your application, in which case you should reduce the number of media files or their sizes. Most video editing software, such as Windows Movie Maker and Apple iMovie, can help you decrease the size of videos by shortening them or re-encoding the video into a more compact format.

You can also set the media source to a URL that points to a streaming video, but the URL must point to the video file itself, not to a program that plays the video.

Permissions

Events

Completed

Indicates that the video has reached the end

VideoPlayerError

The VideoPlayerError event is no longer used. Please use the Screen.ErrorOccurred event instead.

Params
message Text

Methods

Get Duration

Returns: Number

Returns duration of the video in milliseconds.

Pause

Pauses playback of the video. Playback can be resumed at the same location by calling the Start method.

Seek To

Seeks to the requested time (specified in milliseconds) in the video. If the video is paused, the frame shown will not be updated by the seek. The player can jump only to key frames in the video, so seeking to times that differ by short intervals may not actually move to different frames.

Params
ms Number

Start

Starts playback of the video.

Stop

Resets to start of video and pauses it if video was playing.

Properties

Current Position

Number ➖ Read - Blocks

Returns the current position of the source file that is playing.

Full Screen

Boolean ➖ Read Write - Blocks

Returns whether the VideoPlayer's video is currently beingshown in fullscreen mode or not.

Height

Number ➖ Read Write - Blocks

Specifies the component's vertical height, measured in pixels.

Height Percent

Number ➖ Write - Blocks

Specifies the component's vertical height as a percentageof the height of its parent Component.

Is Playing

Boolean ➖ Read - Blocks

Reports whether the media is playing.

Show Controls

Boolean Default: True ➖ Write - Designer Blocks

If enabled the user will see the control buttons.

Source

Text ➖ Write - Designer Blocks

The "path" to the video. Usually, this will be the name of the video file, which should be added in the Designer.

Visible

Boolean Default: True ➖ Read Write - Designer Blocks

Returns true iff the component is visible.

Volume

Number Default: 50 ➖ Read Write - Designer Blocks

Sets the volume to a number between 0 and 100. Values less than 0 will be treated as 0, and values greater than 100 will be treated as 100.

Width

Number ➖ Read Write - Blocks

Specifies the component's horizontal width, measured in pixels.

Width Percent

Number ➖ Write - Blocks

Specifies the component's horizontal width as a percentageof the Width of its parent Component.


Last update: November 9, 2022