Video Playing video on Android == lag & stuttering

I have a project that use several videoclips. It works perfectly fine on windows & IOS, but it's imposible to use it on Android, the videos always plays with lags and sttutering.

The video clips have several resolutions (956x720, 960x960, 512x512, 256x256) all of them are H264, BaseLine 3.0. I tested them with and without transcoding. Multithreaded Rendering enabled and disabled, force to use OpenGL 2, 3 & Vulkan. Nothing seems to work at all, it's imposible to make them play as they should on Android (I repeat, it works fine on Windows & IOS; no weird things happening there).

VideoPlayer is rendering usign MaterialOverride Render Mode (an Unlit/Texture Material).

The app only plays one video each time (there is not several videos playing at once) and even fails playing at 256p resolutions. I just can't believe that Unity's videoplayer is still giving this kind of problems!!!

Any idea?

 

Try disabling multi-threaded rendering in player settings.

 

I tried that but didn't worked.

 

Hi, Did you found a solution?

 

Same issue with Oculus Quest 2, same video play smooth on my laptop, yet on VR it completely lag

 

Having the same problem with 2020.3.9

 

We’re having the same problem and have been working for at least a week with different approaches but still get big lags on Quest 2, with short little 5 second clips. It seems related to stopping the videos and disposing of them in memory. But we have no idea why or how to work around this.
Did you find a solution?

 

I'm having no problems on my Quest & Quest 2 devices.
Here is what I'm using:

- Handbrake to "convert" the 'master' video clip:
Format: h264 (.mp4),
Coder profile: Baseline 3,
Coder preset: "fast" or "very Fast",
Quality: 22 to 24,
Audio: NO audio in the video (erase any audio channel), no subtitles, no chapters.
Video size in my case is 2048x2048.... I'm using chroma videos with a home made shader. If posible use cheap Unlit/Texture shader as main material.

Import the video into Unity with NO transcoding (I never transcode my video clips thats the hole point of using HandBrake).

- Extract de audio using VLC, save it in wav format an import in Unity.

Play the video and the audio clip usin an script to do it (play /stop both clips at once). I'm my case is workng fine. The onky issue is when preparing a video clip, it takes some time (it's a expesive task so I assume isn't any workaround there).

In my experience using audio channels in videoclips always cause troubles so I ended up using a home made player to play video & audio as independent sources. You can try it first withpout any audio at all just to check if video player is working fine in the Quest.

Tested using Unity 2018.4.x, 2019.4.x, 2020.3.x

 

Hi there. We submitted a bug with project for reproduction. The other post you were referring to was also from our project. Please let us know if you're able to take a look -- and thanks for your time.

https://fogbugz.unity3d.com/default.asp?1384846_fit2h1nprud5pji8

 

Hello I am running into the same issue trying to play several small clips in a loop. I tried using handbrake to optimize them all without luck. I like your suggestion of combining video clips all into one, but how can you tell the video player to loop only a specific section of the master video?

Also, which version will have the fix?

 

Hey, I was searching for information regarding one of our problems and it feels somewhat connected to what I read here. We are using the Oculus Quest 1. We also want to loop seamlessly and utilize two unity video players with one video player playing the video actively and the other one acting as the preparing video player that starts playing once the first one is done. They then swap roles.

While the preparing video player prepares, the frames drop to about 30, which is fine, and everything worked okay-ish so far, yet we recently started encountering problems with the buffering video player failing at loading the video every now and then. The VideoPlayer.errorReceived message just states "cannot read file" after it tried to prepare the video for about 7 seconds.

We figured that reducing the resolution and/or bit rate of the videos reduces the frequency of the error and reducing it to a certain point resolves the error completely, but we are displaying 5760x2880 resolution, 35mbits/s, 360 degree videos which suffer a lot from reduced resolution or a reduced bit rate. We optimally would find a solution to keep high video stats while also not encountering the error at all.

Our question to you @The_Island is if you know some reasons to where the "cannot read file" error originates from? Could memory/video memory be a bottle neck? Maybe the read rate of the videos?
Also, do you know if there is a way for the video players to keep the videos loaded somehow (I just assume they don't)?

 

Oh of course, my bad. Here it is:
https://forum.unity.com/threads/ocu...ror-cannot-read-file-while-preparing.1283228/

 

Hello I am having the same issue with Quest 2 and Unity 2021.3.4f1, with videoplayer i can play a 3840*3840px 3D format video without lag on Quest 2. But when i play another video (2160*1080px, mono 360 video), the Quest has a significant lag/sttutering...do we have a solution now ?

 

profiler on MacOS ? Playing issued video has no significant lag on MacOS with Unity Play Button. Only having lag issue with APK installed on Quest 2...Profiler information still useful ?
thanks

 

Ok, thanks for the info. i will make a profile and share with you here later.
Finally, i found something interesting, sharing with you:

Same clip same unity Project, with of 360 mono video, with Graphics APIs-> OpenGLES3 works pretty good in Unity Game Preview and Quest 2.
When i switch Graphics APIs -> Vulkan, only Unity Game Preview looks good without lag. On Quest 2, lag lag and lag.....this problem is related to Vulkan i think...

 

ugh.. me too. My app works fine in the editor, and iOS, but android builds are still choppy.
My app downloads short videos (approx 1 second) and plays them when a button is clicked.

https://apps.apple.com/jp/app/vocabviddys/id1507752099

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.AdamStone.TangoViddys&hl=ja&gl=US

I have tried the multithreading & vulkan settings, have set the version to a very early version too, this app needs to run on as many devices as poss,,
i think it is a very simple app... have not been able to find anything helpful on the googles so far...
any help appreciated !!!

 

Any update on how to fix this running Vulkan?

 

This works for me in quest 2
Thanks

 

Many, many thanks for your post! I have spent many days and tried many things. Nothing helped.
Your method / description works perfectly.

 

I was running into an issue getting videos to play smoothly in an android app. I originally exported them from After Effects but after seeing @jocyf's comment used handbrake to encode the videos and working perfectly now

 

I'm now getting this with 2022.3.7f1, I didn't with previous versions. The only thing that worked was dropping the FPS down to 15, previous versions happily played 30/60FPS videos smoothly.

 

Hi, I am experiencing exactly this: stuttering videos on Android if the framerate is variable (mp4 not webm). I hope it will be fixed in 2022 LTS soon? Thanks for working on it!

 

I'm experiencing the exact same problem when building to Quest 2 / Pro. T

I'm experiencing this on Quest 2 / Pro builds. The video just freezes if I turn off SkipOnDrop. I also found out that videos WITHOUT audio play fine.

Tested H.264 and H.265 at 1920x1080
Vulcan API
Android SDK target 32
Unity 2022.3.5f1

 

Thanks, it worked for me. Here, when I had Vulkan defined and the game installed on meta quest 2, when I tried to record the screen it started to freeze. When I enabled OpenGLES3, it worked normally.

I use 2 low resolution videos (804x806, 30fps) rendered in a raw image, with unity in version 2021.3.16f1