Building a Vertical Video Feed in Flutter Without Crashing
If you put a standard video player inside a PageView.builder, your feed will feel fine in a desktop browser and crash quickly on real mobile devices.
Mobile operating systems share a limited pool of hardware decoders across every running app. Each active video player requests its own decoder session and allocates a GPU texture. Because native engines tear down decoders asynchronously, a user flicking through half a dozen clips creates new players faster than the OS can release old ones. The result: decoder allocation failures, frame drops, or the OS killing your process for hogging graphics memory.
Better Player solves this with controller pooling: recycling a small, fixed set of native player instances instead of allocating a fresh player for every page.