Developing Android Applications with Adobe AIR

Capturing Video

The native video camera can be used to capture video within AIR.

Video and the CameraUI Class

You can use the native camera within AIR to capture video. Your application needs to have permission. In Flash Professional, select File→AIR Android settings→Permissions→Camera. In Flash Builder, add the following permission:

<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.CAMERA"/>

The flash.media.CameraUI class is an addition to the ActionScript language to support the device’s native camera application. It is a subclass of the EventDispatcher class and is only supported on AIR for mobile.

This object allows you to launch the native camera application to shoot a video while your AIR application moves to the background.

Note

When you use the native camera, it comes to the foreground, your AIR application moves to the background, and NativeApplication Event.DEACTIVATE is fired. Make sure you don’t have any logic that could interfere with the proper running of your application, such as exiting. Likewise, when the native camera application quits and your AIR comes back to the foreground, Event.ACTIVATE is called.

The first step is to verify that your device supports access to the camera by checking the CameraUI.isSupported property. Note that, as of this writing, Android does not support the front camera natively, and therefore neither does AIR:

import flash.media.CameraUI;

if (CameraUI.isSupported == false) {
    trace("no camera accessible");
    return;
}

If it is supported, create an ...