MP4-video not playing on any platform

Hi roumenf,

I cannot download your video (403 forbidden...). Can you submit a bug with the platform info so we can reproduce and a minimal project that uses it?

Thanks!

Dominique
A/V developer at Unity

 

Hi again!

OK, I got your file. Trying it on OSX, I do get the same problem as you are mentioning. AVFoundation (the library used to play on OSX and iOS) reports this file may not be playable (no explanation so far but I'm on it). Maybe it's the resolution (640x352 is a little odd) or some of the encoding settings. Can you tell us how the video was produced in case it helps explaining what's happening (and ultimately how to support these types of files?).

Submitting a bug would be best as this is the central place for us to track issues.

Thanks for bringing this to our attention and hope we can find a workaround (or a fix) quickly!

Dominique

 

Hi roumenf,

Following-up: I was able to re-encode your video so it is supported by AVFoundation - the OSX system library used by Unity to implement video playback. I noticed your video was encoded using the H.264 codec High profile, level 3.1. This doesn't appear to be a very well supported profile on AVFoundation. I can dig more to find exactly what feature of this profile level causes AVFoundation to be incapable of playing the file; I may do just that when I investigate the bug you'll submit, as well as investigate what happens on the other platforms.

Re-encoding using the H.264 Baseline profile, level 3.0, provided a movie with the same frame rate, resolution and audio track as the original, but this one plays fine in Unity on OSX. The size becomes a bit smaller: 28970128 bytes instead of 38712975 for the original.

To experiment and investigate with video file formats, my two tools of choice are mediainfo (https://mediaarea.net/en/MediaInfo) and ffmpeg (https://ffmpeg.org).

On OSX, issuing

mediainfo -f portrait-gafni.mp4 ​

on the command-line gave me the information I needed about the video codec parameters.

And

ffmpeg -i portrait-gafni.mp4 -c:v libx264 -profile:v baseline -strict -2 test.mp4​

gave me a test video that was playable. In a real production, you'd probably try to encode your video with this profile in the first place, since transcoding like I did from your file adds one generation of digital degradation due to the aded decode-encode cycle. You can of course decide to live with this slight quality loss, it really depends on how you use the media and how critically you are trying to control the viewing quality.

Over time, we'll improve the VideoPlayer and the VideoClipImporter so they give more information about the file's content and detect better the reason why a given file is not supported. Showing the codec profile and level in the importer, for instance, will have to be added soon because this is a critical piece of information.

Hope this helps and again, thanks for reporting this issue!

Dominique

 

Hi Rumen!

A few precisions:

At least on the OSX editor, the code that creates the thumbnail and the code that does the playback is not the same, so it's expected there will be differences in capabilities. These capabilities even vary between OSX versions. On my side, I never got the playback (in-game or in preview) to work before I transcoded the video. So our job here is not necessarily to "always make it play" (this may be simply impossible if the OSX libraries don't do it), but at least to tell you something like "it doesn't play because this video has profile xyz, please try encoding with profile abc instead".

Excellent! Please post the bug number on this thread so others can follow and I can make sure it's directed to us.

We've been making good improvements to the Android side of things up until the very last minute of the 5.6 release, so make sure you try with the latest build you can get your hands on. The Android development and testing has been focused on Android 6.0.1+ until recently, so many issues with OSes 4.x and 5.x went unnoticed until very recently. 4.1.x and 4.2.x are still causing trouble on some devices but we'll keep improving this. It'd be nice if you could also post the Android device and OS info that you are using to this thread so I can make sure to add these to our coverage testing if not done already.

Again here: please submit bugs (after you had a chance to try a recent build of course) so we can make sure we test your scenarios. As you are finding out: the potential for variations in videos is just endless, so every new type of video we can get our hands on will make the VideoPlayer more robust (provided they're within Android and vendor specs of course).

Very good to hear! Keep us informed of your progress and report back here if you have trouble, we'll be happy to help.

Dominique

 

Another update: I tried the portrait-gafni.mp4 video (original format) on my Windows 10 machine and it plays fine, both in the preview and play mode. This is on the latest 5.6 version (what is likely to become the official 5.6 release).

So please let me know if this behaves differently for you on this latest Unity version and state your Windows version if so, as well as the error message you get, if any.

Dominique

 

Internally, we have an f3 that we are working on, but it is not released yet: this will probably be the the final one. f3 will include a number of Android-specific VideoPlayer fixes as well as a few non-platform-specific VideoPlayer fixes (which I doubt would affect the behaviour of the playback for this video anyways).

Not sure how much luck you will have with this video given the Android profile recommendations (baseline, as stated here: https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/media/media-formats.html#video-formats), but vendors are free to go beyond the minimum recommendations so your mileage will vary depending on device and OS version.

For OSX / iOS : the profile and level definitely have to be reworked on your side as the OS libraries simply don't support this profile as far as I can see (we'll look deeper when working on the bug though).

For Windows : it worked out of the box for me on a Windows 10 machine. I have a hard time seeing what changed between f1 and f3 that would cause it to not work for you but work for me, so let's wait and see. What was the Windows version for your standalone? And what system did your UWP build run on?

Dominique

 

OK, thanks for verifying. As I mentioned, transcoding the video will probably help on all platforms. The fact that this works on Windows for me but not for you points to a config difference (does the video play in Windows Media Player?).

We'll sort this all out when we get to this item in the bug fixing!

Dominique

 

Unless you can find a format that plays adequately on all target platforms, one thing to consider is to have various encodings for various platforms and each one would download the one that is meant for the current platform.

http:// myserver/mygame/<platform>/video.mp4

This is more or less what web video distribution systems do (YouTube, Netflix, ...): they adapt what they give to your player depending on what are the known capabilities of the player.

Of course we'll make sure that every platform supports the widest range of options as possible, but since each platform does have limitations, the strategy described above is the most robust one.

Dominique