Feedback Feature request: Create VideoClip at runtime.

Hi,

Thanks for your feedback! Let me have a word with our Video devs and see what they think and say about this.

Will get back to you with more updates!

Thanks and regards,
Harini

 

Hi!

We hear you loud and clear. This has been a regular request for a long while, and has been on our list of wanted improvements since day one but haven't been able to get there. It'd be nice if you could explain exactly how you intend to create new VideoClips during runtime. Would you be recording them frame by frame from gameplay? Or just procedurally generating the images in background, adding them as fast as possible? Or would you be downloading already encoded files (e.g. mp4) - or creating them with a plugin - that you just want to turn into VideoClips? In this latter case, you may have seen you can already point the VideoPlayer to local files so you don't always have to create actual VideoClips; the performance will be the same.

On this note, I'm curious to hear details about what you mean here:

You always have the option of asynchronously preparing the next video that will be played to minimize the delay when you actually start playback. However, gapless playback when sequencing videos is unfortunately something we cannot do right now, but you should be quite close.

As you may have noticed - only in the editor for now - the MediaEncoder API is what we have to create movie files from code. This is what the VideoClip importer uses when transcoding movie files, and it's also what the Unity recorder is using when encoding mp4/webm files.

So: looking forward to hear more about your needs so we can see how to address this!

Have a good week-end,

Dominique Leroux
A/V developer at Unity

 

Hi. I will try to give you an update. There are multiple points I want to clarify. From what I understand, what you want is a way to transition between clips smoothly. And to achieve that, you either want to expand a video clip at runtime or have a way to fix the gap between clips.

TL;DR We still don't provide a way to create clips at runtime outside the editor. We are still planning on doing it and this is a popular request. But in your case, I think you should be able to transition between clips without gaps. I am not sure exactly what you mean by gaps. What I understand, is there seem to be missing video frames or audio samples making the transition between clips feel like there is a jump in-between. I tried making a script for this workflow and would like to know if this works. And if not, can you record the issue, so I can better help you?

Code (CSharp):

1. using System.Collections;
2. using System.Collections.Generic;
3. using UnityEngine;
4. using UnityEngine.Video;
5.  
6. public class GaplessTransitionController : MonoBehaviour
7. {
8.     public VideoPlayer StartPlayer;
9.     public VideoPlayer WaitingPlayer;
10.  
11.     private long currentFrame = -1;
12.  
13.     void Start()
14.     {
15.         WaitingPlayer.Play();
16.         WaitingPlayer.Pause();
17.         WaitingPlayer.frame = 0;
18.  
19.         StartPlayer.Play();
20.  
21.         StartPlayer.loopPointReached += StartPlayer_loopPointReached;
22.     }
23.  
24.     private void StartPlayer_loopPointReached(VideoPlayer source)
25.     {
26.         Debug.Log("StartPlayer_loopPointReached");
27.  
28.         StartPlayer.Pause();
29.  
30.         WaitingPlayer.targetTexture = StartPlayer.targetTexture;
31.         StartPlayer.targetTexture = null;
32.  
33.         WaitingPlayer.loopPointReached += StartPlayer_loopPointReached;
34.         StartPlayer.loopPointReached -= StartPlayer_loopPointReached;
35.  
36.         WaitingPlayer.Play();
37.         StartPlayer.frame = 0;
38.  
39.         var temp = StartPlayer;
40.         StartPlayer = WaitingPlayer;
41.         WaitingPlayer = temp;
42.     }
43.  
44.     private void Update()
45.     {
46.         if(WaitingPlayer.isPlaying)
47.         {
48.             Debug.Log("WaitingPlayer.isPlaying");
49.         }
50.  
51.         if(StartPlayer.frame != currentFrame)
52.         {
53.             currentFrame = StartPlayer.frame;
54.             Debug.Log(currentFrame);
55.         }
56.     }
57. }
58.  

And this is what it looks like on my side. I get in the Debug.Log all the frames in my clips.

You can hear a gap in the audio but the audio in the file doesn't loop well. So not sure if it is an issue on your side.

All transcoded videos using H264 are encoded in Baseline. If precision is really important, you need to encode your video in Baseline.

Again, all this is a workaround. We know it should not be this difficult to implement a gapless transition, and we are working on improving this. We have a lot of platform-dependent code that we don't have access to, making simple features take years to complete. To fix that, we plan to build our own tools while trying to give as much user value as possible. On the same subject, we now have a roadmap that you can vote on and propose new features, and you can see what we are doing and planning. https://unity.com/roadmap/unity-platform/audio-video.