Screen OCR and Asus camera issue

naphta

秀才
Hi,

I have Pleco on an Asus Zenfone 2 and I have been experiencing issues with the phone camera and the video record function for months. Today I discovered that the cause of this problem is Pleco Screen OCR.

When I restart my phone, I can use the camera through the native app without problem. But as soon as I use Pleco Screen OCR (and I do it a lot to read comics, among other things), the app won't allow me to record video because the phone is in "multidisplay mode". The thing is that my phone has no "multidisplay" option at all, and this message only appears when recording video. But it seems that it is Pleco screen OCR what causes it. I have to restart my phone in order to capture video.

I want to send a ticket to ASUS to explain the problem. I just wanted to ask here how should I present the Screen OCR (what process or what system components does it use) in order to provide them a precise description of my problem.

I'm sorry if this post is not directly related to Pleco...

Thanks for your help !
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Screen OCR is using Android's screencast functionality - not exactly in the way they intended, but basically we intercept the screen images a normal screencasting app would broadcast and OCR them instead. So that probably explains the error - either the system can't manage that technically or they just don't think users want to use screencasting for other things.
 

举人
Just for reference, I use the Asus Zenfone 2 ZE155ML model and haven't encountered the same problems you mentioned. It still works fine for me. While that doesn't solve your issue hopefully that limits the possible causes
 

naphta

秀才
Thanks for your comment. Have you ever tried to use the video recorder of the native camera app after having used the Screen OCR? Apparently this is not a common problem with the Zenfone, so it is maybe related to some config problem in my own device...
 

举人
I just tried it and I have no issues. I'm not sure what the problem could be, is your phone running Android 6.0?
 

naphta

秀才
I updated to 6.0 but the problem remains the same. I just discovered that by killing Pleco, I can record video without problem and then I can enable again Pleco Screen OCR. It's faster than restarting the phone, but it's still very annoying.
 

举人
While not perfect, at least there's some type of solution. The only other idea would be to remove the Asus Android and replace it with cyanogenmod. ZenUI has so much bloatware. Whether that's worth the effort is up to you.
 

naphta

秀才
Yes I was already thinking of installing cyanogenmod, but I'll wait because the phone is still under warranty.
Anyway, thanks a lot for your help!
 

naphta

秀才
Actually, after the upgrade to Android 6 the Screen OCR makes the whole system laggy. No need to force stop Pleco. Exiting the Screen reader service is enough to have the phone working as usual. But now the Screen OCR becomes less useable.
Are there any other apps that use the screencast functionality so that I can test them and maybe try to find some workaround if there are other users experiencing the same issue?
 
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