Android : youtube player has been released

Question

I'm getting this error Fatal Exception: java.lang.IllegalStateException This YouTubePlayer has been released , but release() wasn't called explicitly.Here is the piece of code where crash occurs :

if(youtubePlayer != null){
 time = youtubePlayer.getCurrentTimeMillis();//exception may occur
}

is it possible to check that youtubePlayer was released? Any callback ? Thanks.

Answer 1

Most of the code in the Youtube SDK is obfuscated which makes it really hard to debug. And the fact that there isn't any direct method to check if the YoutubePlayer has been released or not doesn't help either.

Having said that I think making YoutubePlayer null (in onStop()) seems more of a hack than a proper solution to me. You should release the YoutubePlayer in onDestroy() and don't manually assign it as null anywhere. One simple approach to check if the YoutubePlayer has been released or not is put your calls (like youtubePlayer.loadVideo(), cueVideo(), getCurrentTimeMillis() etc.) in a try catch block and catch the IllegalStateException exception.

According to the Youtube SDK documentation on errors:

public static final YouTubePlayer.ErrorReason UNEXPECTED_SERVICE_DISCONNECTION

Playback has been canceled and the player has been released due to an unexpected disconnection from the YouTube API service. Any further calls to this player instance will result in errors, a new player instance must be created to re-enable playback.

So to create a new instance of the YoutubePlayer just call the initialize() method in the catch block.

Example:

public void setVideoId(final String videoId) {
    if (videoId != null && !videoId.equals(this.videoId)) {
        this.videoId = videoId;
        if (youtubePlayer != null) {
            try {
                youtubePlayer.loadVideo(videoId);
            } catch (IllegalStateException e) {
                initialize(API_KEY, this);
            }
        }
    }
}

@Override
public void onDestroy() {   
    if (youtubePlayer != null) {
        youtubePlayer.release();
    }
    super.onDestroy();
}