Failed binder transaction when putting an bitmap dynamically in a widget

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...


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 :)


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);

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


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.