For the Camera you get to pick one of two output formats (NV21 or YV12), so pick YV12. That's your raw YUV data. For screen capture Or Opengl es render the output will always be RGB or RGBA, so you need to pick RGBA_8888 (format 0x1) for your ImageReader, rather than YUV_420_888 (format 0x23). If you need YUV for that, you will have to do the conversion yourself. The ImageReader gives you a series of Plane objects, not a byte[], so you will need to adapt to that.