Reusing renderer

Reuse PlayerView instance for multiple Videos¶

Until now, the setup code is always kohii.setUp(videoUrl).bind(playerView) which may let you think that you will need to bind the Video to a PlayerView instance.

In Kohii, target of the method bind is called container. While PlayerView is the place where Video content is rendered (and therefore it is called renderer, it can also be a container which contains itself).

You can bind the Video to any ViewGroup as container, as long as either it is a renderer itself, or it has no children so that it can contain a renderer later. When you bind to a non-renderer container, for example an empty FrameLayout, Kohii will automatically prepare and add the PlayerView instance to that FrameLayout dynamically. At the same time, the unnecessary PlayerView instance will be removed from container and put back to a Pool. This way, only a few PlayerView instances will be created and reused for as many container/Videos as possible.

By default, Kohii has its own logic for creating and recycling PlayerView, but developers can build their own by extending Engine - another important component of Kohii. Extending Engine and building custom playback logic will be discussed in topics for developers.