How to Play High Quality Video in Unity - unity3d

I'm using MovieTexture now, but when a video file is added to unity Project, it will automatically be imported and converted to Ogg Theora format. and the quality is really bad.
I have tried changing the quality setting and even on the highest setting the video is still pretty bad quality, I have tried it in multiple file formats like .mov, .avi. .mpeg4 etc. I have even tried converting it to .ogv to try and get around unity converting it itself, and still the quality is poor. The platform is PC, and in the build the quality is the same as in the editor.
so the question is ,how to play high quality video in unity no matter using MovieTexture or anything else like some plugins?

Unity player on Windows only supports OGG, which is why Unity is transcoding your videos.
I have use the Renderheads AVPRo Quicktime plugin on Windows to play very high quality videos in kiosk setups. (They also have one for Windows Media format, but I used Quicktime).
Link: Renderheads AVPro (Quicktime)
I am not affiliated with them in any way, just a very happy customer, and here is the review I posted on the Unity Asset store:
Great work on your plugin! I've used so many plugins that don't work well over multiple platforms, or require switching between platforms, or manual steps, or manual licensing, or DLL hell, etc. I have to say you nailed it.
I develop on a Mac (and your plugin runs in the Unity Editor), then deploying on Windows. It all worked well straight forward and as documented. Even the events to detect when a video has loaded and is ready to play just what I needed (as we are loading a large video file).
Additionally, the error messages are very precise and pin-point a problem (missing file, bad format, etc) which means less time debugging.

Related

Does the Unity WebGL exporter work?

Has the Unity WebGL exporter improved in the last year? Thinking about using it for a project but the last time I checked it wasn't fit for purpose..huge file sizes and bugs with different browsers...
I just finished porting my mobile game to WebGL using Unity 2017.1. It has stabilized quite a bit and I found no major issues using it. The biggest annoyance was the long compilation times.
I've found it to be quite good now in 2017.1. It compresses things pretty nicely and load times are not too bad. If you want to see some examples of different games exported to WebGL, I have a site up called SIMMER.io to host these games. Most uploads were created in Unity 2017.1.
There's also a WebGL compressor asset available here, but I have not tried it: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/30335

Unity3D: Cross Platform Video Streaming?

We are working on a prototyp application using unity3d. Your goal is to create a fluid and fun to use cross platform app.
The problem we facing right now is streaming (h.264 - mp4) video content over the web. This will be a major feature of our app.
I have already tried MovieTextures and the www class but it seems the files must be in ogg format which we can not provide. On the other hand handheld.playfullscreenmovie seems to be an android and ios only feature which uses the build in video player. This would be great if it would be supported on other platforms (e.g. Win8-Phone) as well.
Is there another cross platform option to stream (h.264 - mp4) video content over the web and display in full screen or as gui object? Or are there any plans to support something like this in the near future? Or is there a stable plugin for such a task?
Thanks
As of Unity 5 Handheld.PlayFullScreenMovie supports Windows Phone and Windows Store as per http://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Handheld.PlayFullScreenMovie.html
On Windows Phone 8, Handheld.PlayFullScreenMovie internally uses Microsoft Media Foundation for movie playback. On this platform, calling Handheld.PlayFullScreenMovie with full or minimal control mode is not supported.
On Windows Store Apps and Windows Phone 8.1, Handheld.PlayFullScreenMovie internally uses XAML MediaElement control.
On Windows Phone and Windows Store Apps, there generally isn't movie resolution or bitrate limit, however, higher resolution or bitrate movies will consume more memory for decoding. Weaker devices will also start skipping frames much sooner at extremely high resolutions. For example, Nokia Lumia 620 can only play videos smoothly up to 1920x1080. For these platforms, you can find list of supported formats here: Supported audio and video formats on Windows Store
mp4 is not a streamable container. If you read the ISO specification, you will see that MP4 can not be streamed. This is because the MOOV atom can not be written until all frames are know and accounted for. This 100% incompatible for live video. There are supersets of MP4 used in DASH that make this possible. Essentially, they create a little mp4 (called a fragment) file every couple seconds. Alternatively you can use a container designed for streaming such as FLV or TS.
You will probably need to step outside the unity sdk a bit to enable this.

Video streaming solutions

I am attempting to stream a video, in a format unity3d can access, like an mjpg. I have gone through several possible solutions, including gstreamer(only does client side as far as I could tell by the examples), yawcam(I couldn't find a way to access the image directly), and silverlight(due to simply not being able to find how the heck webcam streaming was doable) I am currently just looking for any more methods of getting video over from one side to the other. Could I possibly simply read the images into a byte array and send it over a socket? Maybe I missed something in the previous three possible solutions?
If you are looking to stream video from a server than you can use Ogg encoding + WWW.movie to map it to a texture. Assuming you have a Pro license, as I think this is a Pro only feature. If this is a local file, either bundled with the app or in external folder, we use the brilliant AVPro Windows Media or AVPro QuickTime. MJPEG does offers super smooth scrubbing with AVPro but generates enormous files. Definitely not ideal for streaming or even download!
Finally RenderHead also has a Live Camera capture plugin that could meet your needs.

HLS H264/AAC stream functions perfectly except on OS X and iOS?

We are developing an open-source streaming server and are running into some trouble with our implementation of HLS.
We've been able to successfully convert to TS and segment into HLS segments any stream we want to, and it plays back beautifully on most every player... except for the Apple players (iPad, iPhone, Safari, Quicktime). On those, the H264 encoding settings need to be picked very carefully, and even when sticking to Baseline/3.0 some visible glitching can be seen.
The AAC audio, no matter how we encode it (both ffmpeg's aac and the libfkd_aac encoders were tried in nearly all possible configurations) sounds choppy as well. (Again, all these versions play back just fine on non-Apple players.) Changing the encoding settings does yield better results sometimes, but we've not been able to find any combination that will work for every video we've been testing with.
This leads us to conclude that perhaps the Apple-based players require something in the TS stream itself that we're not doing correctly. Is there anything that could cause this kind of behavior? For reference, an HLS teststream outputted by our packager/segmenter can be found here: link
We appreciate any feedback!

AVAssetExportSession missing audio track when exporting on device

I run the export on the simulator and everything works great. I run it on the device and the video gets exported but there's no audio. This leads me to believe that I must be using an audio format that the device doesn't support but OS X does, as the simulator uses what OS X uses. I've tried m4a, aiff, and aifc and have had no luck! Any ideas??
I have a very similar problem. It does not seem to do with codecs, as I made a separate test case that runs fine with the same video. There’s a related question that says the problem might be in playing the same assets using MPMoviePlayerController. That got me on the right track (sort of).
In my case the trouble stem from using the assets in an AVPlayer during the export. I was not able to find the exact combination that causes the export to drop the audio track – in the separate test project the export runs fine even though the asset plays in AVPlayer at the same time. After several hours of trying to find the exact cause I gave up and simply popped the asset out of the player using replaceCurrentItemWithPlayerItem:nil during export. It’s a hack, but it works.
AVFoundation is a very powerful framework, but God I wish it wasn’t so finicky or at least logged more errors instead of silently producing garbage.