Saving a camera's preview to a bitmap

Question

I need a little help with getting my camera to work right.

What I'm trying to do is have the user take a picture that will then be used in another activity as the view's background. It is important not to have any skewing, and ideally the image would fill the entire background with the highest resolution possible.

I've been having a heck of a time trying to get the outputted picture of my camera to be oriented properly and be the same aspect of the display. So I took some time to think of exactly what I needed to do, and I don't think I need the normal saved image at all.

What I came up with is that I need a surface view to display the preview, and an overlay for some text and a capture button. When the user "takes the picture" it should autofocus, and then I need to capture the preview (under the screen overlays) to a bitmap to use in the other activity.

*Should I extend a SurfaceView for my preview and add it to a XML layout that contains the overlays?

*How do I save the SurfaceView's image to a bitmap?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Apparently, there is no good way to convert the image format of the preview frames to a jpeg, so I ended up selecting the size for the camera to take by going through each of the camera's supported resolutions and getting the closest match the the screen aspect with the highest resolution.

Because the camera.setRotation method doesn't seem to do anything, I just rotate the image 90 with a matrix before saving it to the card if I am in portrait mode.

Answer 2

Matt, One basic question ,and excuse my naivety, wouldnt it just be easier to use the built in camera to the Android through an Intent? It is doable, I've done it before.