[Released] AVPro Video - complete video playback solution

Hi Eric,

For our WebGL implementation, we use the browsers' native video players, which I believe don't support HLS out of the box (with the exception of safari I believe, which does seem to support it).

Kind Regards,

 

Hi,

Thanks for reporting this. Can you tell us the following:
AVProVideo version, Unity version, Windows 10 exact version (eg. 1709). Additionally, how long does it take for the slowdown to occur? Also how frequently are you loading the videos?

Also I believe CloseVideo is automatically called when a new video is loaded, so you don't actually need to do that (although it should make no real difference if you do).

Kind Regards,

 

Thank you (as well as everyone else) for raising this issue. We are looking into this now, will update everyone when we have more information about this.

Kind Regards,

 

Hi,

I think it was a windows update that added support for videos with stereo metadata. AVProVideo doesn't really handle this for MediaFoundation as we only get video for 1 eye. You will need to re-encode the video to have no stereo metadata for it to appear properly.

Kind Regards,

 

Hi,

By "shader is transparent", do you mean you are using one of Unity's default shaders? If so, unpacking unfortunately won't work as it's something we do in our own shaders. What is the material being used for? If for UI, you could use something like the UI-Default-Transparent shader, whereas if you are mapping it to an object, you can try using something like the AVProVideo-Lit-Transparent-Diffuse shader.

Kind Regards,

 

Hi Phil, as well as anyone else having this issue,

It seems this is an issue with Unity 2017.3, where the dll is placed in the wrong directory. We have pushed a fix for this, but in the meantime you can resolve the dll not loading by putting the dll in the directory just under plugins (instead of in x86_64 etc.).

Kind Regards,

 

Hi,

I assume you are the same person who emailed, we can continue this discussion there. To anyone else wondering, Android unfortunately only supports that range, but you can do a workaround by re-encoding the video at some speed first, before changing the playback rate in Unity.

Kind Regards,

 

Hmm... I must be confused how these things worked. I used the hls.js demo web site because I was under the impression that it uses the browser's native video player and it works fine with Chrome, Firefox, etc. Am I mistaken?

 

Are there any in depth tutorials on this plugin?

 

Hi SunriseRH,

Something I just thought of: we're using a self-signed SSL certificate while we're still testing. When testing connecting with VLC I had to temporarily accept the non-trusted certificate. Is AVProVideo sensitive to things like this?

I can't give you the URL unfortunately as it's a work server (and not public-facing most of the time).

This is a Universal Windows Platform build. We're targeting the HoloLens

Thanks.

 

Hi,i want to play video in segment,for example determine one start frame count and end frame count,then play between these frames. when reach the end frame count,automatically stop playing.
Any idea i can achieve this?
Kind regards,
Yorick

 

Hi Eric,

Although hls.js uses the native browser's video player, it does a bunch of extra things such as parsing the m3u8 file, separating the video into readable chunks etc. We will probably look to add support for hls.js in the future, but HLS is unfortunately currently not supported unless the browser's video player directly supports it.

Kind Regards,

 

Hi,

So I just tested this on my local server and an SSL authentication prompt appeared the first time round. Afterwards it just let me play (until I restarted Unity).

Kind Regards,

 

Hi Yorick,

AVProVideo unfortunately doesn't provide an inbuilt method of doing this, but what you can do is convert the start frame to time in ms, and then seek to that and play your video. Afterwards, just check if the video has passed the endpoint, and if it has, pause the video.

Additionally, you may want to encode your video to have a small GOP size for more accurate and faster seeking.

Kind Regards,

 

Hi Jim,

So currently we only provide a bunch of example scenes, as well as the user docs. We are looking to create some tutorial videos this year however.

Kind Regards,

 

Hi, and Sorry.....

after doing tests I saw that the error was very very silly ... I was not compiling the correct scene.

Thanks

 

Hi guys,

I'm working in a project where i load and unload videos from a player and once in a while ( 1 in 5 in general ) the video get glitchy. it looks like the video is playing ( i've been taking the current time at the Update ) but not been displayed.
Any help would supper appreciated
Thanks

 

Hi,

I don't get any authentication prompts on my end.

Are there any test servers on the internet anywhere that I could try connecting to to see which end of the connection is causing the problem?

Can I request that AVPro's error messages be given more detailed information as to what went wrong? As it stands, "Codec not supported or video resolution too high or insufficient system resources" is a bit hard to debug, especially since I can't dig into the native code that actually returns the error code.

 

Hi,

I'm testing using the AVPro Video plugin to play videos on an iOS (iPads only) project. I use Unity's Cloud Build to build my projects since it's more convenient to distribute the builds when they are done (and lets me keep old builds if I ever need to fall back a version). However I can't seem to get Unity Cloud Build to work with the AVPro Video trial plugin. I want to make sure the plugin fixes an issue I can't seem to get around using Unity's built-in VideoPlayer component, but since I can't get the builds to work I can't test it. I tried creating a completely new project and importing the trial package, creating a basic scene that only has a MediaPlayer component and a Display uGui component, and a single video file in the streaming assets folder to play the video, and I still get the error. The error seems to occur after Unity builds the Xcode project, and once Xcode starts building the iOS build I get the following error: "
clang: error: linker command failed with exit code 1 (use -v to see invocation)". I've Googled around but I can't seem to find a clear answer on how to fix this.

I'm currently using 5.6.3p2 and the plugin says it is version 1.7.3t (scripts 1.7.4). In the Player/Build settings I have portrait mode only selected, .Net 2.0 (not the subset) api compatibility level, iPad Only target device, and all the other settings the default ones set by Unity when you switch to iOS builds.

Thanks for you help!

 

Thanks for getting in touch.

Could you please let us know more information. For example:

1) Unity version
2) AVPro Video version
3) iPad model and iOS version
4) Whether you're using the YCbCr option in the MediaPlayer iOS settings
5) The codec, resolution, frame-rate and file size of your videos

Thanks,

 

In the cloud builds settings you should be able to change the XCode version it uses. Can you try changing it to see if that makes a difference?

Thanks,

 

Ok so I just tested the https link in a clean unity project, and it doesn't show the auth request either... I'm not entirely sure what's causing the discrepancy between the two, will have to investigate a bit more.

With regards to the load errors, you can add a listener to the mediaplayer to get a more specific errorcode. That being said, we are also often often unable to determine the exact error, as the errors from MediaFoundation aren't very descriptive either

 

I tried setting it to XCode 9, 8.3, 8, and 7.3 but none of those worked. A outside developer that I've worked with that has AVPro Video was able to successfully build using the same settings I'm using and the same Unity version in Unity Cloud Build, except they have AVPro 1.7.3t with scripts 1.5.25 (they also have the full version and not the trial).

 

We have recently encountered an issue with our AVPro Android install when trying to play SBS 3D videos under Daydream.

When the video is loaded, there is a random jump between eyes, where only one perspective is shown at any time. The jump will toggle in 2D showing first the left view, then the right view. Sometimes the jump happens several times a second, but the frequency appears to be random.

We have done tests using both the AVProVideo-VR-InsideSphere-AndroidOES shader and the AVProVideo-VR-InsideSphere shader, both with the same results.

 

I'm glad you were able to reproduce it! Do let me know if you find the root cause

 

I import AVproVidoe 1.7.4 unity package and have a try. There has a bug, when I play a video on a android emulator(Android api level is 4.2.2), sometimes it's ok, but sometimes there is only sound but no video. so what's the problem?

 

When I add AVPro to my UWP project for a Mixed Reality app the UI stops working in builds. I'm using the Virtual Reality Tool Kit (VRTK) in the project for UI interaction. It works in the editor, but when I make a build the UI will not highlight or select with the Mixed Reality controllers. I removed AVPro from my project and it started working again. Since the issue is only in the build I'm not sure how I would go about diagnosing what is causing the error.

 

Hi!

We have bought your plugin a year ago through inoibérica company (for checking). I am trying to add a 360 video from youtube as an example (

) and google cardboard.

I am using 2017.1.2p3 and cardboard 1.120 and your last version of avpro for android. I can't find a configuration for viewing this "two strip 360 video".

Any help on which rotations or configuration do I need to apply to see it? Video is downloaded and save it in streaming assets not through youtube url.

 

Are you using stereo camera setup using the correct camera rig (platform dependent)?? This type of VR does not require a video that is side-by-side, that is for videos that are not 360. The issue is a factor or two more complex.

From this single source video, here's your answer:
https://medium.freecodecamp.org/how-to-make-a-360-vr-app-with-unity-51cbe41ad8f1

 

Plugin version 1.7.3 with scripts 1.5.25 is very strange. Script v1.5.25 is ancient and they shouldn't be able to work together with the newer plugin. I'm not even sure how that's working

Did you have any more luck with this?

We did just find a bug in our support for Unity 5.6.x, that might be related. We're releasing a fix for it in the next update (1.7.5) which should be released in the next few days.

Thanks,

 

Hi,

Could you give us more details, such as your Unity version, the version of AVPro Video plugin you're using etc?
Are you using the UpdateStereoMaterial component in your scene? Could you send over screenshots or a video of the issue?

There is a bug currently in the Android OES shader for stereo support, and the fix will be in the next version (1.7.5) which will be released in a few days.

But if you're having this issue with the other shader then I suspect there is an issue with your setup. Please let me know about the above so we can help further.

Thanks,

 

Hi,
Are you using ExoPlayer or MediaPlayer video API? Perhaps you could try both to see if it makes any difference? The option to select this is on the MediaPlayer component, under "Platform Specifc > Android" section.

Also, in our experience the support for video playback in the emulator can be a bit unreliable...

What are the specs of the video you're trying to play? (frame-rate, resolution, codec, file size)

Thanks,

 

Hi!
That sounds very strange...Is it possible for you to make the simplest project with VRTK and our plugin that exhibits this problem and send it to us? We're happy to take a look.

Also, it would be useful to know the usual things like Unity version, AVPro Video version, your UWP build settings..etc

Thanks,

 

Hmm, I'm a bit confused, because that youtube video you posted isn't stereo...

If you download a stereo video (either top-bottom or left-right), then you can use our 08_Demo_360SphereVideo sample scene. Just change the video file name in the MediaPlayer, and in the Visual section select the type of stereo packing. That's all you should need to do.

Thanks,

 

Hi All,

AVPro Video version 1.7.5 has just been released!

You can find the updated version on the Asset Store and the free trial version / demos on our website.

Changes include:

macOS

• Fixed a build issue with Unity 2017.3 related to the post build script
• Fixed a build issue with Unity 2017.3 related to universal/64-bit plugin metadata

macOS, iOS and tvOS

• Fixed a build issue with Unity 5.6.x related to a missing zlib dependency

Android

• Fixed stereo support in OES shader
• Fixed support for IsBuffering state in ExoPlayer

Windows desktop

• Fixed a rare bug when using DirectShow and Unity 2017.3 that would cause the video texture to display as a single channel or black
• Fixed a performance bug in the DirectShow player that meant a paused video would continue to upload frames to the GPU

Thanks,

 

Hi SunriseRH,
In a related question to dj002 about SSL issues when self signed, is there any way for us to manage the protocol side of things and pass a stream into avpro?

I see that the underlying windows media player has a method called OpenSourceFromStream which supports a IRandomAccessStream. If there was some way to pass in an IInputStream, or regular dotnet Stream then we could handle reading the data from a network (or wherever) and AvPro could just play the bytes.

So in summary, is there a way to just feed bytes into an AVPro MediaPlayer?

Thanks,
Mat

 

Its not 3D you're right. Sorry. What its confusing me is that after downloading it as others from youtube I get this type of video:



One screen with two areas. Superior area is not fully wrapped if using an sphere. It seems top area is horizontal and bottom area is vertical in a sphere.

Thanks

 

I sent you a message with a link to download a simple version of the project.

 

Hi,

We have existing unity app and we are trying to embed it into iOS framework. We were following recommendations from this article: https://github.com/blitzagency/ios-unity5, and adjusted build settings to be the same as in unity app when possible. But there are some linking issues regarding your plugin:
Undefined symbols for architecture arm64:
"_UnityEndCurrentMTLCommandEncoder", referenced from:
_AVPPluginUnityRegisterRenderingPlugin in libAVProVideoiOS.a(AVProPlugin.o)
ld: symbol(s) not found for architecture arm64
clang: error: linker command failed with exit code 1 (use -v to see invocation)
Meanwhile, the unity application itself works fine. Could you give us some guidance about this error?
Unity2017.2.0f3

Thanks

 

Hi!
Is it possible to display a NDI source (ndi://...) via DirectShow (using NewTek's DirectShow Filters coming with their SDK)?

 

Hi Mat

I unfortunately don't think the API we are using (MediaEngine) allows us to pass through an IInputStream. That being said however, you can also switch to DirectShow, which does allow you to pass through a byte buffer. It does need to be once off however (so you unfortunately can't stream the data in).

Kind Regards,

 

Hi,

I don't believe AVProVideo would be capable of this as we read from a file source, that being said, if the ndi filter is registered as a video capture source, I believe AVPro Live Camera should be able to receive the video feed.

Kind Regards,

 

Hey thanks! I will try Live Camera then.

EDIT: does not work in Live Camera either.
AVPro Video opens the url ("ndi://computername/sourcename?video=true") without error but does not display anything.

 

Thanks for your quick response. It seems the issue was caused by someone scaling the Camera to 0,0,0 which the UpdateStereoMaterial was unable to separate eyes.

 

Out of curiosity, what category is the filter registered as? Also does LiveCamera pick it up?

 

From the NewTek NDI SDK Documentation:

In WPF this works just by pointing the MediaElement's source to the URL (ndi://computername/source).

The desired setup is: An application window (powerpoint for example) is captured and broadcast as NDI source. This already works. Now we have to to display a bunch of these sources in Unity. NDI was chosen to avoid the requirement of grabber cards (too expensive I guess).

 

Ah yea just had a look at this, LiveCamera doesn't pick it up as it's only registered in the DirectShow category. We don't list those as other filters such as video decoders and encoders etc. will be shown as well.

 

We tried to add an 360 video with spatial sound to one of our project.
We used an mkv video file with Opus Codec, however, we run into the problem that such video files couldn't be played at all.
We always got the error "wrong codec or resolution to high...". We have mp4s with higher resolution (and longer) duration in our app which never run into that problem.

We also tried a normal (not 360) mkv video (converted with the same software) and could run it without a problem.

We use the newest version of your plugin and Unity 5.6.0p4. The app is for the GearVR. (And we have a minimum API Level of Android 5.1 or higher).

 

Hi,

Did you set your video API to ExoPlayer, enabled facebook audio 360, and set the channel mode to the channel mode in the video?

Kind Regards
Sunrise

 

I see, so it is just not listed but would possibly work in theory?