The playerview retains its instance on a device rotation

[DKillWorld]

Issue description

The playerView retains its instance even after activity is finished by calling finish(). The new instance is created everytime in onCreate(). You can observe this behaviour by rotating screen as well. This happenes until app crashes with OOM error.

Reproduction steps

Create playerView in XML, connect it with player instance in activity class. And rotate device or finish activity by transiting into any other one.

Link to test content

Will email you. It may happen with demo app too I guess, havnt tried though.

Version of ExoPlayer being used

V2.8.0

Device(s) and version(s) of Android being used

Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 Pro, Android 7.0

A full bug report captured from the device

Not needed. Just analyze java heap after each device orientation change. It keeps increasing until OutOfMemory Exception.

[ojw28]

This sounds like an application bug to me. It's your responsibility to release each player instance, by calling player.release(), as well as any references that your application code holds to it, when the instance is no longer required. The issue does not reproduce in the demo app.

[DKillWorld]

I keep my player instance in Service, and I dont want it to be released on activity's ondestroy(). I just want my playerView reference to be cleared on activity rotation which is not happening right now.
I set playerView.setplayer(null) on activity ondestroy(). But its still not cleared from memory. I dont know why. Any suggestions??

[ojw28]

I don't understand what "The playerView retains its instance" means. It sounds like your application code is leaking something. Whatever you're seeing more instances of in the heap after every device orientation, you should trace the path from those instances to a GC root, which will show you the reference chain that's causing the leak. You need to fix that.

We're not able to assist debugging your code. If you can reproduce with our demo app then that would be evidence that it's an ExoPlayer issue, in which case please reply here with concrete reproduction steps.

[DKillWorld]

Strangely enough, I fixed issue with just setting intent flag to Reorder_Front when switching between activities, and no more than 1 playerView instance in memory heap.