[Released] AVPro QuickTime (DEPRECATED)

Hey Andrew,

I was wondering if you can help me out. I have just started using AVPro Quicktime and I like it so far, but I am having an issue when building the standalone. When I create my build I end up with a white screen for the video. I know some one else posted in this thread about the same issue but they were using pc and I am using mac. I read through the FAQ in the pdf and saw the 5th question seems to relate to my issue, but Im not sure what files I am supposed to put in the content package. I tried just the video, I tried the whole project, I tried just the assets.. I have run out of ideas. If there is any way you could help me out I would really appreciate it. Thanks.

 

Hi!

One thing you could do is download the Mac demo of AVPro QuickTime from the website and see how the video files are stored there.

Hope that helps

 

So I read that when porting a UNity game to the Win8 App Store, native code plugins must be rewritten using WinRT. I found this link:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh441569.aspx

Do you have any plans on doing this for your Quicktime plugin?

Thanks in advance.

Sean

 

Hi Andrew,

First of all, thanks for the always quick and thorough support, we appreciate it.
Another crazy question... is it possible to access the audio of a quicktime video? We're trying to record a video that's played with your quicktime plugin with the moviecapture plugin, but there's no video. Any pointers as to where to look or if it's possible?

Cheers,
Norby

 

Hi Sean,

I believe WindowsRT uses the ARM platform. I don't think QuickTime is supported on Windows RT so our plugin wouldn't be able to work on this platform either.

 

So you're trying to capture audio from the QuickTime video into an AVI file? The problem is that QuickTime does it's own audio playback and we don't use Unity for it. Thus if you capture audio from Unity it won't include the QuickTime audio. This is something we can look at improving in the future. The only option for now is to write through own support for QuickTime audio, or to set AVPro Movie Capture to record audio from the Speaker device (if your soundcard supports this) as it will then capture all the audio from your system including QuickTime and Unity.

Hope that helps,

 

We have no plans on supporting the ARM platform currently, just the x86. Even so, we would need an x86 version of your plugin that is compiled against WinRT instead of Win32. If you have no plans on doing this, what about for your windows media player plugin?

 

Hi Butterworth,

Windows RT is still very new and we will need some time to investigate what's possible. Most of our plugins rely on x86 libraries (DirectShow, QuickTime) which their authors won't be porting to the ARM architecture so it is impossible to recompile them to work on RT. We may investigate supporting Media Foundation which is a multi-media API which is supported on both Intel and ARM Windows versions.

 

Yeah, that's exactly what we're trying to do... I guess we'll look into loading the audio from a separate mp3 file, and try to keep it in sync with the video. Thanks!

 

Hi,

Unity Version: 3.5.6f4
AVPro Quicktime Version: Initialization says 2.40, the package said 2.43

I am having a problem that has me baffled. After running for an extended period of time (let's say 24 hours), I am unable to play any more movies. When I look at the output_log it showsthat the AVProQuickTime plugin throws a warning that says something like "Movie indexes too high.... Restart Unity" every time I attempt to play a movie.

Key points:

• I am playing multiple instances of the same movie.
• I am playing different movies.
• The game runs for days at a time.
• The time it takes for the bug to present itself varies, but is usually 24+ hours
• I am loading and unloading every movie

I have been experimenting with 2.50. I created a test environment where I play 2 different movie assets across 8 instances. The following behavior is observed:

If I load, play, and unload the same movie, its MovieInstance handle will always be zero. When I load, play, and unload a different movie, its instance handle will also be 0. When I start loading, playing, and unloading two or more movies at the same time, their handles will begin to increment, even though I'm unloading (which is releasing the handle from the looks of the source code). Is this expected behavior? The only way to get the handles to reset is to deinit and Init the AVProQuickTimePlugin. I have a feeling that this has something to do with the problem I am having. Could you assist me?

 

Hi Punisher,

Yes that is a known issue. For each movie you play we create a unique ID to reference it. Unfortuantly we aren't currently recycling these IDs so if you play many videos it will run out of handles. In the next release we will address this. Thanks for bringing this back to our attention.

 

A quick question hopefully. When we submitted our unity game to the Apple Store we received this error:

Unsupported Architecture - Application executables may support either or both of the Intel architectures:
• i386 (32-bit)
• x86_64 (64-bit)
Other architectures may not be included in submitted binaries. Confirm that your Xcode project's build settings include those architectures and no others.
Specifically, we found the following unsupported architectures in your binary:
• ppc (in Cleopatra II.app/Contents/Plugins/AVProQuickTime.bundle/Contents/MacOS/UnityQT)

Is this something you can fix on your end by supplying a version of the plugin that only supports the intel architecture?

Thanks in advance.

 

How to use movie source of "Memory"?

 

Hi,
I bought this asset and I'm truly amazed of the video capabilities I have right now inside Unity. As Quicktime is a huge platform with lot's of more functionality beside just playback a video I have a couple of questions:
Is it possible with this asset to create a client for livestreaming videos? Quicktime supports RTSP/Http-Live Streaming. Could I display such a video stream?
Can I read more information from my quicktime file? I need a way to read a timecode track from a video.

Thanks.

 

Butterworth - please email us: contact@renderhead.com with your invoice number. We have a custom .bundle file that might help you out.

Cheers,

Nathan

 

Hi Yuuki,

In order to use the Memory source, you need to read in a byte[] array containing your movie data which is then loaded into memory. There are a few ways to acheive this. One would be to create TextAsset and then pass the binary data to the plugin. The benefit of this is that your movie file gets serialised into the game and is hidden from the end user.

The first step is to create a Resources folder in your asset directory and copy your video file into that folder. Rename it so it has the extension ".bytes" This is very important as it tells unity this file is a binary resource.

Load your binary resource as a text asset:

set source type to memory. _Movie is a AVProQuickTimeMovie object

load byte data.

load movie

clear movieData

Hope this answers your question

Cheers,

Shane Marks
Support
contact@renderheads.com

 

Hi Sloopi,

great that you are finding the asset so useful!. To answer your questions regarding quicktime streaming. I have done a test loading an url pointing to a quicktime file and that certainly works (pre recorded stream encoded with 'quick start'). This feature is in beta as noted in the user documentation.

As for live RTSP streaming, it will require a bit more investigating from our side. If you could supply us with a link to suitable RTSP stream we can try and test it out for you. Please email us a link to contact@renderheads.com

Regarding getting the timecode out of the file could you elaborate more on what you mean by the timecode track from a video? Are you referring to external timing data such as smpte information etc? If so we don't currently support that but we may consider adding it in the future if there is enough demand for it.

As a workaround, you can try use the opensource application FFMPEG to extract the timecode data by launching it as an external process and capturing the result. Please see this page for a list of codecs/containers support: http://ffmpeg.org/general.html#Timecode

If you have any further questions please don't hesitate to contact us.


Shane Marks,

Support
contact@renderheads.com

 

Hi,
I want to play a mp4 video (H264,1447x576,16Mill,AAC,Stereo,48KHz,25fps, datarate:1,79Mbit/s) but the performance is really bad .The framerate is not constant and most of the time around 5fps . In tested the different colour formats and other things but I guess that my video is the problem. In the taskmanager I see that one of my cpu's is under full load. When I play the video in the Apple Quicktime player I have no problems and the the CPU load is 3%. (Win 7 64 bit i7 CPU 2.93GHz) What should I consider to get best results? Is the resolution of my video(1447x576) the problem?
A second problem is that I can't load the video from a url. Its a "https://" url and the video has the faststart option. I always get [AVProQuickTime] Couldn't load movie warning.

On OSX I have huge problems playing the video without Unity crashes. Only when I use the 'Maximize on Play' option in the Editor i can run my scene , play and stop my movie without a problem. When I start my computer new an run my Unity scene for the first time I can play my movie and stop it without a problem when I didn't have the 'Maximize on Play' option of my scene window, but when I try to play the video a second time Unity crashes.

In my script I do the following steps:

Play movie:

_AVProMovie = gameObject.GetComponent<AVProQuickTimeMovie>();
if(_AVProMovie != null){

string folder =Path.GetDirectoryName( _currUri.AbsoluteUri);
string fileName = Path.GetFileName( _currUri.AbsoluteUri);
if(_currUri.Scheme=="http"|| _currUri.Scheme=="https"){
folder = Path.GetDirectoryName( _currUri.AbsoluteUri);
_AVProMovie._source = AVProQuickTimePlugin.MovieSource.URL;
}else{
folder = Path.GetDirectoryName( _currUri.LocalPath);
_AVProMovie._source = AVProQuickTimePlugin.MovieSource.LocalFile;
}
_AVProMovie._folder = folder;
_AVProMovie._filename= fileName;
_AVProMovie.LoadMovie();
_AVProMoviePlayer = _AVProMovie.MovieInstance;
if(_AVProMoviePlayer!= null){
_AVProMoviePlayer.PositionSeconds = 0f;
_AVProMoviePlayer.Play();
}


Stop Movie:
if(_AVProMoviePlayer!= null){
_AVProMoviePlayer.Close();
}

Is there anything wrong with the way I start and stop my video?
Thanks

 

Hi There,

Sorry you are having troubles
Starting with with url problem. Seems there might be a minor problem in your code, When you are setting

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. // input: http://quicktime.tc.columbia.edu/users/lrf10/movies/sixties.mov
3. folder = Path.GetDirectoryName( _currUri.AbsoluteUri);

for an url,
it will will output a directory style string like so:
http:\quicktime.tc.columbia.edu\users\lrf10\movies



So to fix this, in your url check loop please try:

Code (csharp):

1. if(_currUri.Scheme=="http"|| _currUri.Scheme=="https"){
2. folder = _currUri.AbsoluteUri;
3. //we dont need a filename anymore as it is contained in the url
4. fileName="";
5. }
6.  

Note the "folder" in this path can contain the full url we can set the file name to empty.

I used this url: http://quicktime.tc.columbia.edu/users/lrf10/movies/sixties.mov for testing.


The strange playback could also be a result of trying start playing the movie before it has loaded. When downloading from an url, or a local file for that matter be sure to implement a check that checks that the video can infact be played and has enough of the video loaded in the following way:

Code (csharp):

1. if (moviePlayer.LoadedSeconds > 0f || AVProQuickTimePlugin.IsMoviePlayable(moviePlayer.Handle))
2. {
3. //generate GUI play button
4. }
5.  
6.  

or

Use a coroutine / thread to wait a few seconds or until a certain amount of content has loaded before playing.

Could you try your video footage in the demo scenes and see how that plays back? What application are you using to encode the video file? If you could send me a small snippet of video with the same encoding, or a unity package for testing I can see if I can replicate the problem on my side.

If you prefer we can continue this via email. Please contact me at contact@renderheads.com

Regards,

Shane marks
Support
contact@renderheads.com

 

Hi.

I have tried e-mailing that address twice now and it comes back rejected after a couple of days. I forwarded the problem to an IT on my side and he told me there was something wrong on your end. Is that listed e-mail address correct?

 

Hi Butterworth,

Sorry to hear you are having problems. there was a typo in the email address! please send your email to contact@renderheads.com

Kind Regards,

Shane Marks

 

Hi,
I was wondering if there's a way to create soft shadows having a .mov with an alpha channel ? Right now the shadows seem to be pretty hard but I don't know how to fix this.
Thanks a lot, I really appreciate your work.

 

Hi,
I just bought the plugin but unfortunately I am unable to get this working.
The movie plays in the editor (Mac) but it doesnt on the windows (32bit) build.

I also couldn't find any hint in the documentation where to place the actual movie file so I basically spammed the complete build folder with my movie... without any success.

In my unity project I placed the movie under Assets/movie. This is also the value I put in the "Folder" variable in the AVPRO Quick Time Movie component.

In my windows build I placed an Assets/movie folder in the "Project_Data" folder as well as on the same folder level as the executable.

I was looking at the output_log which says:

Strangely the correct DLL can be found in the Plugin folder within the build and I also copied the dll/bundle to my root plugin folder of my unity project.

I really hope you can help me I was figuring this out for the last 6 hours...

 

Hi raphg,

Transparency should be soft.... If it's not working for you please send us your video file and we'll take a look.

 

Did you install QuickTime on your Windows system?

I see your path is "C:/build/builds/Prototype_Data/Plugins/AVProQuickTime.dll" Can you confirm that:
1) Your EXE is in the folder "c:/builds/builds" and that you're launching the application from this folder.
2) That your application file name is called "Prototype.exe"
3) That the plugin DLL exists in "c:/builds/builds/Prototype_Data/Plugins/"

If all of the above is confirmed then please send us a copy of your build to debug.

 

Hi!
I was wondering if we can get a hold of the project file of the demo?

I seem to be having the same problem as zlSimon and others... where we only see white after build...

Thank you for your time...

 

The Unity project file for the demo is included with the asset. Check your player_log.txt file to see if there are any error messages.

 

I just fixed it my problem.... awesome plugin!

 

What would the code need to be to have a gui button play a predefined movie?

 

Hi Tony,

Something like this C# script should work:

Code (csharp):

1. using UnityEngine;
2. using System.Collections;
3.  
4. public class PlayVideoButton : MonoBehaviour
5. {
6.     public string _filename;
7.     public AVProQuickTimeMovie _movie;
8.  
9.     // Use this for initialization
10.     void Start () {
11.    
12.     }
13.    
14.     // Update is called once per frame
15.     void Update () {
16.    
17.     }
18.  
19.     void OnGUI()
20.     {
21.         if (GUILayout.Button("Play Video"))
22.         {
23.             _movie._filename = _filename;
24.             _movie._playOnStart = true;
25.             _movie.LoadMovie();
26.         }
27.     }
28. }

Then you just add this component to a GameObject, link the AVProQuickTimeMovie and enter the filename you want to play. The button should appear and on clicking it will swap the video.

 

Version 2.8 has been released!

One of the most exciting new features is support for the GPU accelerated HAP codec! With HAP you'll be able to play multiple 1080p videos at once all ultra-smooth with instant scrubbing, reverse playback and seeking.

We now also detect transparency in the video automatically so you don't need to specifiy this manually any more!

Unity 4.2 and the upcoming 4.3 support are included.

We've added some new demos including multi-video playback and extraction of video frames.

We've fixed a number of issues and bugs.

Hope you all like the update. Please keep in touch and let us know how you get on.

Cheers

 

Small update to the demo and the version on the asset store. 2.81 Released with a fix for the automatic alpha-channel detection feature.

 

Where is exactly is this code? I would like to determine if quicktime is installed explicitly before setting up AVPro and trying to load a video. The only thing that I have found so far is:

[DllImport("AVProQuickTime")]
public static extern bool Init(bool supportUnity35OpenGL);

but is there any other way to do it? Could Init fail for any other reason other than quicktime not being installed?

 

I'm having a lot of issues with this plugin.

I'm loading short, but large movies, (about 4k x 4k).

I get the following, useless error spam. Sometimes it just spinlocks unity.
magic == 1234
Gfx command not handled: -842150451 (Last command: 10064)

When it does play, the video is warped diagonally. What gives?

 

Here is the result of a 1080p mp4, output from quicktime.

[AVProQuickTime] loaded movie Assets/Content/stadiumTest_animated_v03b.mp4.bin[959x1080 @ 29.97003hz] RGBA32 1.334667 sec 40 frames
UnityEngine.Debug:Internal_Log(Int32, String, Object)
UnityEngine.Debug:Log(Object)
AVProQuickTimerepareMovie() (at Assets/AVProQuickTime/Scripts/Internal/AVProQuickTime.cs:321)
AVProQuickTime:Update(Boolean) (at Assets/AVProQuickTime/Scripts/Internal/AVProQuickTime.cs:438)
AVProQuickTimeMovie:Update() (at Assets/AVProQuickTime/Scripts/Components/AVProQuickTimeMovie.cs:125)

(Filename: Assets/AVProQuickTime/Scripts/Internal/AVProQuickTime.cs Line: 321)

Gfx command not handled: 999072411 (Last command: 10069)

(Filename: /Applications/buildAgent/work/cac08d8a5e25d4cb/Runtime/GfxDevice/threaded/GfxDeviceWorker.cpp Line: 1669)

Gfx command not handled: 0 (Last command: 999072411)

(Filename: /Applications/buildAgent/work/cac08d8a5e25d4cb/Runtime/GfxDevice/threaded/GfxDeviceWorker.cpp Line: 1669)

Gfx command not handled: 1065353216 (Last command: 0)


(Filename: /Applications/buildAgent/work/cac08d8a5e25d4cb/Runtime/GfxDevice/threaded/GfxDeviceWorker.cpp Line: 1669)

etc etc etc....


Receiving unhandled NULL exception
Launching bug reporter

*** Launching bug reporter due to crashbug.

 

Also, everything is being warped. I think it's not parsing this file correctly. I've tried mpeg4, h.264, animation codec, uncompressed yuv. Exporting from AE, recompressing in FFMPEG and quicktime. Still, same thing, either spin lock, or not correctly playing back video.

 

Actually, this is spamming errors and crashing using the demo scenes, as well, in an empty unity project.

OS X 10.8.5, Unity 4.2.1

 

I'm seeing the same things as Brian with version 2.8.1.



We use your plugin for kiosks/exhibits built in Unity. I'm using StartFromFile() and the warped video is with allowYUV set to false (RGBA32), the pink video is with allowYUV set to true (YCbCr). The video is 1820x1024 @ 23.98 H.264 MP4 8 Mbit/s

We are fading in the video, so we would prefer RGBA32, but we could lose the alpha for better performance and just getting the video to play.

If we roll back to an older version, we do not see this, but the video playback is a bit choppy and there is some slight tearing. This could be related to the high bitrate and alpha.

We have tried many different combinations of codecs and compression settings and can't seem to find a solution. For now we are using an older version of the plugin.

MAC OSX 10.8.5 - Unity 4.2.1f4

 

Yes, it could also fail is their version of QuickTime is too old. This is the right code to use though. Perhaps in the next release I'll add a specific function for this.

 

Hmmm. It seems there is an issue with the latest release on Mac only.. We'll investigate this.

 

I have noticed choppy playback at 30 fps 1080p, in the next version can "smooth frames" be added just like in windows media player?

 

Hi Tony,

What do you mean by smooth frames?

And yes, the next version will have a new feature that should make playback smoother.

 

I spent several days watching a 30 second clip and noticed that the performance was better without the Direct3D setting.

"smooth frames" is a setting inside one of the options in MS media player that allows frame blending.

I hope the extra info. helps.

-Tony (Unity 4.2.2 Win 7)

 

Sorry if this has already been asked, but is it possible to get a preview image from a movie file? Something like:

Code (csharp):

1. delegate void PreviewImageCallback(Texture2D preview);
2. void AVProQuickTimeMovie.FetchPreviewImage (PreviewImageCallback callback, float where = 0.5f);

?

 

Could you give more details on how this would work? Is this to extract a single frame from an unloaded video?

 

Exactly. It doesn't need to have the callback if it's a fast operation. Even better. Just a simple:

Code (csharp):

1. public Texture2D FetchPreviewImage (float where = 0.5f);

would do.

 

Cool, I understand now. Well this is something anyone could add via a script... It could be handy so I'll add it to the list of requests to integrate with the main plugin scripts.

Thanks for the suggestion!

 

Nice project,

Has lots of potential.

Only thing is that when playing back videos on my macbook pro 16g ram, the video performance is choppy. VLC player is much smoother and uses much less CPU. Is this something that can be fixed?

 

Hey, Hi
I'm little new for Unity Development. I'm using your AVPro QuickTime Plugin for my application.
I couldn't get the videos palying on the final build of your demo scenes, i can see only the cube. Videos are playing fine in the unity editor.
I tried building all your scenes for windows with no success.
FYI-I'm using Unity Pro (4+).

Please find the image showing problem.

Please help me to resolve the issue.

 

I'm wondering where I need to put files so that the Unity executable can read them when I am building to Mac OSX 10.8.5? I've gotten my videos to load properly putting them in the streaming assets folder, but after migrating to the Mac they no longer display. Any help would be greatly appreciated.