[Released] AVPro Video - complete video playback solution

Event FinishedPlaying is not working!
Can you fix it ASAP?
Thanks

 

Thanks we have fixed it now and will be submitting it to the store soon. If you require a version ASAP please email me. Thanks,

 

Hi Zeren,

Different platforms have different capabilities when it comes to video streaming. We are improving the documentation for this in the next release, but basically it means things like HLS support is good on Apple operating systems, and the newest Android devices, but really nothing else. Often the best way to support streaming on multiple platforms is to offer different streams - this is fairly standard.

In order for your MP4 example to stream you need to encode it for streaming.
When encoding MP4 videos for streaming make sure they are encoded with the video header data at the beginning of the file. You normally do this by selecting “Fast Start” in QuickTime encoder, or use the “-movflags faststart” in FFMPEG, Other encoders will have a similar option. To prepare an MP4 for streaming using FFMPEG you can use the following command:

ffmpeg -i %1 -acodec copy -vcodec copy -movflags faststart %1-streaming.mp4

Here is an example of MP4 set for streaming:
http://downloads.renderheads.com/2016/BigBuckBunny_360p30_Streaming.mp4

Thanks,

 

Thanks Tom, we also recently discovered this and are working on a solution. Expect an update on this soon.

Thanks,

 

Version 1.2 of AVPro Video is brewing and should be out very soon.

This update will address a host of small issues without introducing new features, so it's all about stability here:

Changes include:

• Better audio file support
• Better video streaming documentation and support
• Better supported file format documentation
• Some nice performance improvements
• Improved editor workflow
• Standard bug fixes
• Many minor improvements

It doesn't sound very exciting we wanted to make a good maintenance release before we hit you with the big stuff next

 

Hi @AndrewRH and folks,

I downloaded the free trial package and tried to display video that come from http://downloads.renderheads.com/2016/BigBuckBunny_360p30_Streaming.mp4. It returns no errors on logs, however it doesn't seem to work too (limitation due to free trial perhaps ?).

Does the plugin can really handle video from an url ? Did anyone succeed to display video from an url ?

I think of getting the full version, but I really need to know if the package can deal with online videos.

Thanks,

 

Yes that URL should work, but we found there was a bug in the Windows version of AVPro Video v1.1.0.

We have fixed the bug and in a few days the fixed version will be out.

Online videos is a very broad area and we don't support all streaming formats. The support also depends on the platform. On Apple devices HLS streams and HTTP download streams (like the URL above) work well. For newer Android devices HLS streams also work but not so much on older Android devices. HTTP download works on pretty much all platforms we support. HLS doesn't currently work on Windows and neither does RTSP/RTMP currently.

Thanks,

 

Can you tell me what the minimum API level supported is for AVPro Video for Android devices? Thanks

 

It's level 15 I will add this to the documentation - thanks

 

AVPro Video v1.2 has just been released!

You can grab it now from the Asset Store.

We have also updated the free trial version, demos and documentation.

Changes include:

• General
  • Improved support for audio-only media (MP3s etc)
  • Improved streaming support (HTTP Progressive, HLS etc)
  • Added HasVideo, HasAudio and HasMetaData functions
  • Added MetaDataReady event
  • First frame now displays without starting playback
  • Added new ApplyToMesh component
  • Removed troubled #AVPRO defines
• Android
  • Fixed issue where Finished event wouldn’t fire
  • Minimum API level bumped from 15 to 16
• Mac, iOS, tvOS
  • Improved performance of multiple video playback
• Windows
  • Improved performance (duplicate frame handling)
  • Added missing IsSeeking function
  • Fixed IsFinished function always returning false
  • Fixed URL parsing
  • Fixed OpenGL texture cleanup
  • Fixed minor D3D11 leak caused by views not being released
  • Improved init/deinit
• Workflow
  • Resulting file name is now displayed clearly and is copyable
  • More file extensions in inspector file browser
  • Components now have AVPro icon
  • Added warnings for incorrect Player Settings for streaming videos
  • Editor platform override tab is restored
• Debugging
  • Improved logging
• VR
  • Improved 360 Sphere demo support for GearVR
  • InsideSphere shader has color tint option for stereo debugging
• Docs
  • Added video streaming notes
  • Added VR notes
  • Improved notes on supported formats

We hope you like the update

Thanks,

 

hi，AndrewRH. When I use AVPro On my mobile game for ios, It works great on ios 9, but when I run it on ios 8.2 , it crashed with the following stack.

and the Key Log is :
2016-04-05 10:48:57.055 crazyplant[12419:3671766] -[MTLTextureDescriptor setUsage:]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0x17020fe00

So, Can you help me to how to solve this problem? thanks very much.

 

Could you please describe the behavior of IsFinished(); a bit more? I see that this gets set to true when a movie is done playing. Does it stay this value forever? Or is it reset to false when a new movie is loaded? I am attempting to use it in place of the MediaPlayerEvent.EventType.FinishedPlaying, since that isn't working right now. Thanks!

 

Don't know about the IsFinished(); behavior, seemed weird to me in the 1.1 version when testing.
But in the 1.2 version the FinishedPlaying event (only tested on Android) is working as it should now. So maybe you can use that one instead of checking for IsFinished or time/totalTime.

 

Hi everyones!

I downloaded the free trial package, we need to make it work on w7 soon, do you have any release date about windows 7 support?

Thanks!

 

Hi, I'm creating a 360 video experience using a 4k video.

codec: h.264
data rate: 20158kbps
total bitrate: 20219kbps
frame rate: 30fps
dimensions: 3840 x 2160

I'm running on a GeForce GTX 980Ti graphics card, with a DK2, but I see stuttering when I move my head around in the Rift. The editor doesn't stutter. There is also no stuttering with standard HD size video. I was using the video sphere example provided with AVPro.

Has anyone else experienced stuttering using AVPro and 4k 360 video?

Please any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

 

Interesting. I'm also running on Android and version 1.2, and FinishedPlaying event is most definitely not working. I only get responses from the ReadyToPlay and FirstFrameReady.

 

Some more detail here... I'm using Unity 5.3.2f1 and AVPro 1.2.0. Not only does the FinishedPlaying event never fire off, when looping a movie I don't see another Started event each time the movie plays, which I would expect to.

 

FinishedPlaying also does not work in the editor running on OS 10.11.4.

 

Ok, I'm seriously running out of time on my project and am trying to find any workaround for the non-functioning FinishedPlaying event. So can someone tell me the correct syntax to get the length of a loaded movie so I can set a timer to wait that long? It looks like I can do this with IMediaInfo.GetDurationMs, but the documentation is really sparse. Also, will that return a value in seconds, or milliseconds?

If this fails I think I'm down to manually setting timers for the length of each movie, which will ultimately work but not look polished as it will never really be on time. Would love a more elegant way to do this. Thanks

 

Hi i'm really interested also by this plugin but the only issue that is preventing me to buy it right now (testing the trial version) is the broken FinishedPlaying event. Have you already a fix available for this issue ?

 

for me it works in the MediaPlayer.cs class i changed this line (in the Update method)

if(!m_Control.IsLooping()&& !m_EventFired_FinishedPlaying&&m_Control.CanPlay()&&m_Control.IsFinished())

to this

if(!m_Control.IsLooping()&& !m_EventFired_FinishedPlaying&&m_Control.IsFinished())

and the event is fired correctly. Not sure if it may have side-effects on other aspect of the plugin but it looks not...

 

Thanks yvrez! I just did a quick test and that seems to work. I'm going to steam ahead with it for now. Thanks so much.

 

Thanks for the bug report potu, we will investigate this and get back to you.

Thanks,

 

Windows 7 support is coming in the next update

 

Thanks xtopher, we're looking into these issues. We seriously thought they were fixed in v1.2.0. Looking into it and will get back to you. We may release a v1.2.2 soon with a few fixes and some performance improvements.

 

Hi Potu,

Please email unitysupport@renderheads.com - I have a fix for you and need to email you a copy.

Thanks,

 

Hi Patrick,

Email me at unitysupport@renderheads.com - I have an updated version v1.2.1 with improved performance which should help you. Otherwise wait and it will be included in the next release.

Thanks,

 

Youhou! Thanks, that's gonna help us a lot!

 

Hi

I have a couple of questions about your plugin. Firstly I've been using AVpro for windows in my project Whirligig for two years now and I'm very happy with it. I am however very excited to see you pushing forward with new plugins and the cross platforms support sounds really good. So here are my questions, pretty much all windows version questions.

Does the plugin now support hardware decoding?

How does the plugin handle the sound. I'm having problems with the previous version (AVpro for Windows) as I'm producing for Oculus. This was fine for the DK2 but the CV1 redirects the audio to it's own headphones. Does your plugin support this? Are you aware of the issue with the previous plugin?

Does the sound get pushed to a sound source for positional sound. I couldn't see much information in the documentation on this.

Does it support Directshow filters? The previous plugin plays all the formats using these but it looks like that your new one uses a different framework. If is doesn't, will it at some point and when are you hoping to implement that.

Windows 7 support. I know you've mentioned the addition of windows 7 support in the future but do you have any timeframe for this. This reason this is important for me is that the Oculus Store won't except programs that don't support windows 7 so Windows 7 support is a must for releasing on their store.
Edit (Just reading above and saw that windows 7 support is on it's way in the next release, looking forward to it)

Image support? Any considerations on supporting image loading. Having something more than png and jpg loading would be great.

Other than than it's great to see such advances in your plugins. I look forward to properly working with them.

All the best

Phil

 

My project is setup with JavaScript. Can I access things like RenderHeads.Media.AVProVideo.IMediaControl.GetCurrentTimeMs() from Javascript?

 

hi Andrew,

Just to let you know when using the "keep aspect ratio" on a ugui surface the video works the first time but doesn't show up the next time you play a video. Note that i'm disabling/enabling the parent view that contain the video plane between playbacks. I had to remove that flag to make it works.

 

Hi,

We spoke during the beta about a few feature additions, one of them being Chroma Keying. Do you still plan on adding this feature?

Adam

 

While i agree that should be the desirable way for the events to fire.. I think the documentation, at the time of my writing, specified that the onFinishedEvent only fires for non looping videos. The suggested fix would indeed remove that limitation.

I too am rooting for Win7 support.

Also, Whirlgig is my goto player for the Rift!! Congratz on the recent recent work bringing it to CV1 and HTC Vive @nsc_creative , great job on mixing both in one build, would be awesome if you could blog some more about your setup in Unity. I'll be a happy customer once you release and i get my CV1

 

Glad you like me player I've just released it on Steam so I'm currently getting good feedback from a lot more users. People are far more likely to let you know when there's a problem when they've paid for it. It's in many ways what spurred me on to contact the people at Renderhead so I can add the features that people are after.

 

Hi Phil, let me answer your questions

The plugin doesn't yet support GPU decoding, but this is something we have working in v1.2.1 which is currently just an internal release (we have sent it to some users too). The GPU decoding works great and we're looking forward to including this in the next major release.

Sound is currently played like our old plugins - globally. I didn't realise there was an issue with CV1 (I currently on have DK2 and GearVR to test with, but CV1 should be with me soon). So perhaps we need to at least expose an option to use a certain audio device? Does the CV1 headphones just appear as a normal audio output device?

Sound doesn't get pushed to a sound source node. This is something we are looking into for the future but we have a few more pressing features to get in before this.

It doesn't yet support DirectShow but this is coming. The plugin is currently based on Media Foundation (on Windows) which is the newer API from Microsoft. DirectShow still has many benefits over MF so we are definitely going to be releasing a version with support for it soon (actually I was working on this today). I'm looking forward to this as then the player will have the benefits of the old and new video playback APIs.

Windows 7 support will come automatically once DirectShow support is added, but we will also add Media Foundation Windows 7 support at some stage.

Image loading? Interesting idea. I'll have to put this way down the list though.

I think you'll like the new AVPro Video plugin, it's already leaps and bounds better than our older plugins and is only getting better. Feel free to try the trial version available on the website.

Thanks,

 

Hi Wenneker,

Yes calling C# code from JS is possible in Unity, it just requires some moving of script files to different folders so that the C# is compiled before the JS. More details here:
http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/252865/accessing-a-c-field-from-javascript.html

Thanks,

 

Hi yvrez, could you give more details on this? I tried to replicate it but haven't managed to so far.. It would be good to fix this if it is a bug

Cheers,

 

Yes this is still a key feature we plan to add soon. Currently we have a few highly requested features to get in there and then we will begin on this.

Thanks,

 

@AndrewRH
Could you please provide a JS example of how to control players or read information from the plugin? I'm a bit out of my league here.. What I currently have is this:

Code (JavaScript):

1. #pragma strict
2.  
3. import System;
4. import System.Runtime.InteropServices;
5. @DllImport ("AVProVideo", EntryPoint = "IMediaControl")
6.  
7. static private function GetCurrentTimeMs() : float {};
8.  
9. var curTime:float;
10. var textObj:UI.Text;
11.  
12. function Start () {
13.      duration = GetCurrentTimeMs();
14. }

I'm obviously doing something wrong as the entry point gives an error.
Or do you recommend I give up on this and work on finding a way with intermediate C# scripts and call functions from those?

 

Yes, I would definitely recommend using C#, but that's just my preference

In your script there's no need to call DLLImport - that's just used for access functions in a native DLL.

I'm no JS guru but perhaps you can translate this simple C# example into JS:

Code (CSharp):

1.  
2. // Tell it which name space to use
3. using RenderHeads.Media.AVProVideo;
4.  
5. // We need to set the MediaPlayer that this script uses in the Unity inspector
6. public var MediaPlayer player;
7.  
8. // Runs each frame
9. void Update()
10. {
11.     // Check the media player is initialised
12.     if (player != null && player.Control != null)
13.     {
14.        // Call function to get playback details
15.        float time = player.Control.GetCurentTimeMs();
16.        Debug.Log("time is: " + time);
17.     }
18. }

 

Thanks. C# is something I'm not too handy with so I'll first try translating your example. I'll post here if I get it working.

 

If it's phileday aka NSC Creative.

Thanks for your reply, all the features you've said would be incredibly beneficial. Both Direct Show and media foundation support would be great. I'm currently waiting for the Windows 7 support before trying the demo because if you haven't guessed, I'm on windows 7. Hopefully I don't have to wait too long

I do have an issue with the current plugin (Avpro for Windows) let me know if I should move this to another forum. The problem I'm having is loading in a video that isn't supported. I make a player that allows to choose videos so they can easily choose videos that will fail on load. This in it'self isn't a problem. The problem I'm having is that before it would try and load the video and fail, then I would give a message to the user, the video failed to load and would be black. Now since the last update it goes white. This seems to only happen in the build not in the editor. Is there a way to stop it doing that?

Thanks for your help and I egerly wait for your next update

Phil

 

Thanks for the example. I got it working. Was easier than expected.
One thing to be aware of is that for the javascript code to work the contents of the package have to be placed in the folder "StandardAssets" otherwise you'll get a "BCE0021: Namespace 'Renderheads.Media.AVProVideo' not found" error.

Code (CSharp):

1.  
2. // Tell it which name space to use
3. using RenderHeads.Media.AVProVideo;
4.  
5. // We need to set the MediaPlayer that this script uses in the Unity inspector
6. public var MediaPlayer player;
7.  
8. // Runs each frame
9. void Update()
10. {
11.     // Check the media player is initialised
12.     if (player != null && player.Control != null)
13.     {
14.        // Call function to get playback details
15.        float time = player.Control.GetCurentTimeMs();
16.        Debug.Log("time is: " + time);
17.     }
18. }

Code (JavaScript):

1. #pragma strict
2. // Tell it which name space to use
3. import RenderHeads.Media.AVProVideo;
4.  
5. // We need to set the MediaPlayer that this script uses in the Unity inspector
6. var player :MediaPlayer;
7.  
8. function Start () {
9. }
10.  
11. function Update () {
12.     // Check the media player is initialised
13.     if (player != null && player.Control != null){
14.         // Call function to get playback details
15.         var time : float = player.Control.GetCurrentTimeMs();
16.         print("time is: " + time);
17.     }
18. }

 

I also vote for windows 7 support! Cant add our app to Oculus Store without it.

 

We're working on it right now Should be done soon and in the next release (v1.3.0).

 

FYI, changes we hope to get in to the next version of AVPro Video (v1.3.0) include:

• Windows
  • DirectShow support, ability to use all installed DirectShow filters
  • Windows Vista and Windows 7 support
  • GPU hardware decoder path exposed
• Android
  • Multi-threaded rendering support
• General
  • Native hap codec support for Windows and OS X
  • Improved editor UI features
• Various bug fixes
• Various documentation updates (including stereo VR notes)

Thanks,

 

Hi

I've managed to get on a Windows 8 machine and I'm testing out the plugin. It already feels smoother which is great although I'm currently having problems with a couple of things.

The first is that the plugin doesn't return any messages if a video fails to load or if there is a problem. The mp4 I was trying didn't work (I rerendered it from AFX and got it working) but I didn't get any messages. I tried making a text document and change the extension to mp4 and tried loading that as well but still no error messages.

The other thing is the apply to material. When I do this it changes the tiling and offset. I don't want it to do this as I already have all this setup. I also have situations where I only want to display a quarter of the video. Is there a way of having it not change these settings.

The third thing is returning the frame numbers instead of the time in ms. Should I just be converting back to frames using the framerate (not sure how to query that yet) and ms or is there a better way?

All in all though I am looking forward to updating my program with this plugin. The loading times seem quicker and everything seems smoother already in my small amount of tests

 

Hi Philip,

Yes it's true that error messages aren't returned if a video fails to load! We'll add this in the next update (v1.4.0)

We can add an option in the MaterialApply script to not override the offset/scale. We currently just do this to flip the video vertically through negative Y scale (some videos need it), and to shift the UV's for stereo videos. We'll make this optional in v1.4.0. It's quite easy to edit the script though and change this yourself if needed.

Frame numbers is a tricky thing... Some videos are variable frame rate which make knowing the frame number tricky - also a lot of the playback engines we use don't keep track of the actual frame number... We are going to have to think how we could make this work. Videos that are a constant frame rate are easier.

Cheers,

 

Hello,

I tried the trial version and noticed that when playing a high resolution http stream (ts mpeg) on an Android device, the video begins to lag behind a lot, while the audio is played in real time. Is there a way to fix this issue, so that if the video lags, the audio is kept synchronized with it?

 

Version 1.3.0 of AVPro Video has just been released!

You can grab it now from the Asset Store.

We have also updated the free trial version, demos and documentation.

Changes include:

• Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 support by adding DirectShow playback path.
  
  
• A new GPU accelerated video player for Windows (8.1 and above, D3D11 only). To use this you need to run editor and your app with the "-no-singlethreaded" command-line argument.
  
  
• Multi-threaded rendering support on Android
  
  
• Hap1 and Hap5 codecs supported in DirectShow playback path (note that this doesn't yet work in Win8 and above but will come in the next release).
  
  
• Quite a few bugs fixed, UI improvements, documentation updates

For more details see the release notes in the documentation.


Thanks,