androidx / androidx/media

Sometimes the Player fails to load the first frame of the video with `rendring output error -32`

Open
#2,809 0 comments 0 reactions 1 assignee View on GitHub

@microkatz is already working on this.

Since Sep 30, 2025.

bug needs triage
Dominant language
Java
Stars
3k
Forks
955
Avg merge
12d 14h
Merged PRs (30d)
2

Description

Version

Media3 1.8.0

More version details

No response

Devices that reproduce the issue
  • Android API 36.0 Emulator
  • Physical Android devices (more difficult)
Devices that do not reproduce the issue

No response

Reproducible in the demo app?

No

Reproduction steps

This isn't really reproducible in your demo app, since it seems like it doesn't test local resources (and autoplays the videos), I didn't try modyfing the demo app since I had already prepared a minimal repro app that makes it easy-ish to reproduce this issue.

https://github.com/behenate/media3-exoplayer-first-frame-render-repro/tree/main

  1. Open the project (or any project that loads a local, initally paused video, in the MainActivity) and run the app
  2. Make sure that the player has a renderer factory with setEnableDecoderFallback set to true
  3. There is a chance that instead of seeing a VideoView containing the first frame of the video you will see a VideoView which is fully black. You will also see the following warning in the Logcat
[c2.goldfish.h264.decoder#152] queueBuffer failed: -32
rendring output error -32
  1. This happens quite rarely, so you may have to restart the app a bunch of times.
  2. You can press play, the video will start playing normally.
  3. Check out the README of the demo app for more details on repro and tested cases.
Expected result

When displaying a PlayerView with a paused ExoPlayer the first frame of the video should always be displayed.

Actual result

Randomly the VideoView doesn't render the first frame, rendering a black content instead and logs the following in the Logcat

c2.goldfish.h264.decoder#152] queueBuffer failed: -32
rendring output error -32

I think this only happens around the time that the VideoView is first laid out, I may be wrong though.

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/a1d69b74-847d-4d2a-a64a-4395bc6b690b

Media

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/971258d8-b812-41b2-95d4-5c8dcbd55999

Bug Report
  • You will email the zip file produced by adb bugreport to android-media-github@google.com after filing this issue.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Assessment

This issue has not been assessed yet.

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.