Notification artwork appears visibly downscaled/blurry in Media3 notification on newer Media3 version(s), while the same source artwork renders high quality on an older Media3 version.

[itSMcodez]

Version

Media3 main branch

More version details

The bug is produced by the version 1.9.2. I downgraded to 1.8.0 and 1.9.0 and had no issues.

Devices that reproduce the issue

Tecno Spark 5 - Android 10
Samsung A05s - Android 15

Devices that do not reproduce the issue

No response

Reproducible in the demo app?

Yes

Reproduction steps

Reproduction steps

1. Create MediaSessionService with MediaSession + ExoPlayer.
2. Set MediaMetadata.artworkUri to local album art URI (for example content://media/external/audio/albumart/{albumId}) or embedded art-backed URI.
3. Start playback and show media notification.
4. Compare rendering quality between:
   • broken version: <bad>
   • working version: <good>

Expected result

Expected behavior

Artwork quality in notification should preserve source quality (or at least match previous Media3 behavior).

Actual result

Artwork is blurry/downscaled on <bad version>, but sharp/high quality on <good version> with same media items/artwork source.

Media

Bug Report

• You will email the zip file produced by adb bugreport to android-media-github@google.com after filing this issue.

[marcbaechinger]

Thanks for your report. This may be caused by this commit that landed in 1.9.1 as far as I can tell. I find it starting with 1.9.1: (https://github.com/androidx/media/blob/1.9.1/libraries/session/src/main/java/androidx/media3/session/DefaultMediaNotificationProvider.java).

Tecno Spark 5 - Android 10
Samsung A05s - Android 15

Did you see the same on other devices? Like I'd be interested whther this works as expected on a Pixel device for instance. If this is that case, then we have some differences on different platforms.

It's our intention to soften the impact of bitmaps that are send over the binder to the platform and back. At least the bitmap should not be larger than needed when they are send around from system to apps and back. So the idea is that we scale the bitmap down to the size that the platform would scale them down. This way, we don't produce useless data that is sent over the binder just to be then scaled.

So the commit from above attempted just that: scaling the bitmap to the size that the Android system would scale it down anyway. My question from above whether you see this on a Pixel device is pointing in that direction: if another device vendor does something with the bitmap that we don't anticipate, the we would have an issue.

So I think we should try to figure out why the bitmap is blurry, even if we think we don't scale them down any further. My questions to start with this:

• do you see this with the demo app as well on the devices you listed above?
• do you see this only for bitmaps with 'content://`-URIs or in general
• how does the artwork look on a notification with a vanilla Android which would be for instance a Pixel device?

[itSMcodez]

Hey, thank you for the feedback!

• I currently don’t have access zq to a physical Pixel device to verify behavior on vanilla Android so I used the emulator and the outcome is still blurry.
• The blurriness happens when using artwork loaded from content:// URIs (MediaStore) and setting MediaMetadata.setArtworkData.
• The artwork itself is high-resolution and appears sharp inside the app UI — the blur only appears in the Media3 notification.
• I have not yet reproduced this using the Media3 demo app; I will test and report back once confirmed.

From what I’m seeing, it looks like the bitmap may be getting additionally scaled somewhere on certain OEM implementations after Media3’s resizing step.

[marcbaechinger]

Ok, cool, that would be great!

When I test on the same Pixel with 1.9.0 (left) and main (tip of tree, to the right), then I would mean I don't see any differences. At least not in a way that it would be visible

Please lemme know if you find these differences are present for you on a Pixel phone as well.

[itSMcodez]

Yeah, so your screenshots i.e. left pic shows blurry artwork (I mean the artwork itself isn't sharp/quality to notice the blurriness though) but the right image isn't blurry. So yes this is the idea.

[marcbaechinger]

Hmmm. Oh god, how old am I that I can't see this even with glasses?

So if I gave three pairs of such pics without telling you what is left and right you would be able to tell which one is which? Isn't the hair to her left hand blurry in the same way?

[itSMcodez]

Lol, I think yeah both are blurred... anyways engineers experience simple problems as bigger ones 😆
Am just a Linux nerd here 🤣.

[marcbaechinger]

Yeah, of course. Both are scaled up with my graphic viewer to actually see the details.

left pic shows blurry artwork (I mean the artwork itself isn't sharp/quality to notice the blurriness though) but the right image isn't blurry.

Because you got it wrong? To the left is 1.9.0 which shouldn't be blurry given your report. To the right is 1.10-beta which should be worse.

[marcbaechinger]

[itSMcodez]

Idk, I still see both blurry, to avoid long discussion, and over-engineering. I think the bug started prior to 1.9.0 or if am wrong. I had tested 1.8.0 through 1.8.5 and the images looked sharp. I decided not to focus too much on the notification as I am working on AI features right now for my music app to be released within next month for my users. But still I know most users cares about even the smallest detail.

[marcbaechinger]

Nice, have fun with your features! Isn't Layah Noir already shocking everyone?

[itSMcodez]

Yup!