Android - How to stretch video to fill VideoView area

The VideoView class included in the Android SDK provides a very convenient wrapper of the Surface View class. It takes care of computing its measurement from the source video so that it can be used in any layout manager.

By default  Android will scale the video to fit the VideoView but keeping the video aspect ratio. That means that depending on the device's screen size there might be some black spaces left around the video the video since the it's not filling the screen.

Depending on what you are looking for, you might actually want to completely fill the parent container area even if that means to stretch the video to fill the gaps (in other words, altering the aspect ratio of the video).

Well, turns out that even though the VideoView doesn't provide an explicit way to specify the filling mode, you can achieve the same result by wrapping the video view in a Relative Layout and setting the VideoView alignments to match the parent's boundaries:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<RelativeLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    android:layout_width="fill_parent"
    android:layout_height="fill_parent">

    <VideoView android:id="@+id/videoViewRelative"
         android:layout_alignParentTop="true"
         android:layout_alignParentBottom="true"
         android:layout_alignParentLeft="true"
         android:layout_alignParentRight="true"
         android:layout_width="fill_parent"
         android:layout_height="fill_parent">
    </VideoView>
    
</RelativeLayout>

Here is an example of two different layouts, one using a Linear Layout to wrap a VideoView and the other one using a Relative Layout:

LinearLayour wrapper

RelativeLayout wrapper

So, whether you want to keep the aspect ratio of a video or stretch it to fill its parent area, using the right layout manager can get the job done.

Hope this helps!