Failed binder transaction when putting an bitmap dynamically in a widget

Question

Can anybody tell me the reason for failed binder transaction error? I can see this error message in logcat. I am getting this error while trying to put an bitmap dynamically in a widget...

score 92 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 31 '11 at 14:13

This is caused because all the changes to the RemoteViews are serialised (e.g. setInt and setImageViewBitmap ). The bitmaps are also serialised into an internal bundle. Unfortunately this bundle has a very small size limit.

You can solve it by scaling down the image size this way:

 public static Bitmap scaleDownBitmap(Bitmap photo, int newHeight, Context context) {

 final float densityMultiplier = context.getResources().getDisplayMetrics().density;        

 int h= (int) (newHeight*densityMultiplier);
 int w= (int) (h * photo.getWidth()/((double) photo.getHeight()));

 photo=Bitmap.createScaledBitmap(photo, w, h, true);

 return photo;
 }

Choose newHeight to be small enough (~100 for every square it should take on the screen) and use it for your widget, and your problem will be solved :)

What I don't quite understand is what happens here exactly. I'm using a ViewPager with a fairly large dataset, yet it does remember everything between pages despite the binder error spam. Does the bundle get written to local storage and then prefetched or what? Can I possibly lose data if I add more pages? — G_V, Dec 03 '14 at 08:18

score 65 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 27 '13 at 22:06

65

You can compress the bitmap as an byte's array and then uncompress it in another activity, like this.

Compress!!

        ByteArrayOutputStream stream = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
        bmp.compress(Bitmap.CompressFormat.PNG, 100, stream);
        byte[] bytes = stream.toByteArray(); 
        setresult.putExtra("BMP",bytes);

Uncompress!!

        byte[] bytes = data.getByteArrayExtra("BMP");
        Bitmap bmp = BitmapFactory.decodeByteArray(bytes, 0, bytes.length);

answered Aug 27 '13 at 22:06

Nicolás Loaiza

1,015
11
11

1

Perfect, this significantly reduces the bitmap size. – Navin Apr 28 '14 at 09:16
1

why not use JPEG instead of PNG? isnt it better compressed? – mehmet6parmak Apr 06 '15 at 12:20
3

@mehmet6parmak PNG is used because it is lossless, unlike JPEG. Yes, JPEG compresses better, but the quality (somewhat) suffers as a result. – Petzku Jun 18 '15 at 08:39
doesn't work for me :( https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34540819/still-get-error-failed-binder-transaction-although-have-compressed-it – John Joe Dec 31 '15 at 04:11
Kudos! Great workaround for a temporary implementation I was working on. Although passing heavy data should be avoided while using Bundles/Intents. – sud007 Jul 28 '17 at 12:01
What is the `bmp` variable? – Paradox Jun 26 '18 at 20:16

dharmendra · Answer 3 · 2013-07-11T06:18:07.117

38

The Binder transaction buffer has a limited fixed size, currently 1Mb, which is shared by all transactions in progress for the process. Consequently this exception can be thrown when there are many transactions in progress even when most of the individual transactions are of moderate size.

refer this link

edited Jul 11 '13 at 06:18

answered Apr 23 '12 at 13:37

dharmendra

7,835
5
38
71

score 13 · Answer 4 · edited May 23 '17 at 10:31

13

See my answer in this thread.

intent.putExtra("Some string",very_large_obj_for_binder_buffer);

You are exceeding the binder transaction buffer by transferring large element(s) from one activity to another activity.

edited May 23 '17 at 10:31

Community

1
1

answered Dec 06 '14 at 15:52

Balaji Dubey

446
5
10

I had same issue I just remove putExtra problem sorted! – Ivor Mar 29 '16 at 13:38

score 8 · Answer 5 · answered May 30 '13 at 08:04

8

I have solved this issue by storing images on internal storage and then using .setImageURI() rather than .setBitmap().

answered May 30 '13 at 08:04

MartinC

546
11
26

1

and don't pass the images through Parcelable from screen to screen or so, I guess that's worst in this case – MartinC Jun 05 '13 at 11:33

score 3 · Answer 6 · edited Dec 03 '16 at 02:15

3

The right approach is to use setImageViewUri() (slower) or the setImageViewBitmap() and recreating RemoteViews every time you update the notification.

edited Dec 03 '16 at 02:15

Baris Demiray

1,539
24
35

answered Sep 16 '13 at 17:31

Alexander Woodblock

497
9
31

Failed binder transaction when putting an bitmap dynamically in a widget

6 Answers6

Linked