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Quicktime support for streaming video

Discussion in 'Wish List' started by EducaSoft, Jul 19, 2009.

  1. EducaSoft

    EducaSoft

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    Are there any chances to see QUICKTIME support for movies?

    I do understand why you put ogg theora as codec, but to be very honest ogg theora is FREE but certainly not of high quality compared with what is available on the market nowadays.

    If I compare 256x256 videos (yes thats not that big) which I compress on flash video as on2VP6 codec at only 300kbps then they look ravishing, but the ogg theora version doesn't look that good.

    I do understand that you want to avoid codec licensing, but if unity could stream quicktime movies too, then you have free access to ultra high h264 and on2 codecs which looks waaaaay better then ogg theora.

    Agreed -> People would then need quicktime installed. But in the past (you must recall this from your director age) almost all software requiring good video playback just offered a way to install quicktime.


    If people want to have their webplayer work without having to have quicktime installed, then let them use theora.
    But if they want to use quicktime, then of course its a task for the developer to have quicktime installed.


    You can't imagine how much better quality quicktime video is compared to ogg theora. After all its a PRO feature, but to be very honest its quality isn't that PRO unless you use significantly higher bitrates which is a complete waste of disk space or bandwidth.
     
  2. Dreamora

    Dreamora

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    Quicktime is no free format. Not even the compression to mov is free (has per seat license fees).
    Additionally you would have to pay h264 licenses if you wanted to use that format.

    It would be nice to have a better quality format than theora, but I'm unsure if QuickTime is the right way to go.


    Did you put that in the voting system for unity / vote for it if it is already there?
     
  3. EducaSoft

    EducaSoft

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    Dreamora,

    I did put it in the uservoice system.
    By the way, quicktime might not be free, but its free to install the quicktime player.

    You do need quicktime (probably with a license, that is possible) to create the files, but honestly, I bought such a license for my windows pc and I think it didn't even cost me $50
    Thats on the developers site.

    Distributing quicktime files and playing them is free.
    Thats also why most movie trailers are duistributed in quicktime format.

    Of course h264 isn't free at all, but you can install the free quicktime player (looks like apple has a deal there to buk distribute it) and playback h264 content.

    So if you're interested in this too, please vote it on uservoice

    http://feedback.unity3d.com/pages/1.../159245-video-native-quicktime-movie-playback

    Regards,

    Bart
     
  4. Dreamora

    Dreamora

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    Problem is you don't use their player so you don't fall under the QuickTime playback in such cases.
    You want to playback it within your own proprietary player (your game).

    Its as with mp3: its free to playback mp3 in players that support it but if you add it to your own app you are going to pay a few grands per game.
     
  5. HiggyB

    HiggyB

    Unity Product Evangelist

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    Part of what Bart is after, at least based on other threads, is also the potential to do like Shockwave and link to the external (and thus separate) QuickTime player for this. Thus our player would only need to link against that player and use it to render QT videos. That sounds nice as it alleviates our base level file size concerns but then it's not nice in that we cannot claim native support for that playback which to many is a potential deal breaker (now you have two player detection routines and two player install routines, etc.).

    I'm not offering a UT opinion either way, I'm just citing that there are different ways to think about offering video support, natively or by linking against other installed technologies.
     
  6. Dreamora

    Dreamora

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    Makes sense only to a webplayer or am I seeing that wrong?
    Using an external player actively disallows to use it on a texture or am I missing something there.


    The two format problem could be solved by just kicking theora. Wouldn't make sense to keep it if QT was added for quality reasons, as most would skip it anyway.

    On the other hand, by Unity 3.x when a new video format could become of interest, the new theora code potentially is stable and capable to compete with QT / WMV9 just without the license fees and its all a non-topic again.
     
  7. HiggyB

    HiggyB

    Unity Product Evangelist

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    Why is that only "sensible" in the web player? Sure the "external player to reduce our player size" offers a nice web player benefit, but the functionality would be useful on the desktop and the web.


    Not necessarily, you can load an external player and grab the rendered image just fine (have you never seen the HTML texture plugin for example? imagine that but instead of rendering pages it would be about rendering videos).


    Once again, I'm not stating any official UT attitude or feeling here, I'm just discussing this topic with y'all. :)
     
  8. Dreamora

    Dreamora

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    Yes, but I want people to play my games and if it requires an external player from a not that much liked dev (viral spreader apple, bundling their apps with other apps to force them out) then its not really an option.
    If a format is added then it just must work from within the application for standalones and optimally for the webbuild too.

    Grabbing a HTML page is one thing as HTML rendering apps are pretty lightweight on the cpu and the amount of data that is grabbed is low.
    Its a completely different thing for video and that aside of the problem that grabbing the audio already isn't a trivial nor light task. The performance impact from having 2 3D accelerated windows (as video codecs are 3d accelerated on Windows) at the same time + grabbing the amount data cross application is a heavy performance hit.

    But perhaps thats my error as I was under the impression that the idea is to have a higher quality format that works on a similar or even better performance (as QT would be hardware accelerated unlike theora), not significantly slower.


    Didn't assume anything else :)
     
  9. HiggyB

    HiggyB

    Unity Product Evangelist

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    And your points raised against using an external web player are ones I generally agree with personally. Use of external tech is problematic, introduces dependencies folks often want to avoid and is as a whole less elegant than having built-in native support right there in the engine. :)
     
  10. MHillyer

    MHillyer

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