[Released] AVPro Video - complete video playback solution

Hi all.

I want to play a video stream on Windows and Android, and the stream requires authentication.
Is there any way to add user/pass to the URL or the header?

Thanks.

 

I'm having issues getting both 360 and worldspace uGUI video players working with WebVR--with 360 I'm getting a black screen but the sound is playing, with the uGUI canvas set to worldspace I'm getting the canvas applied to the camera like a traditional GUI layer and it's really not usable.

Any help super appreciated!

Using Unity 2019.1.81f
Web VR 1.6.0
AVPro full 1.9.17

 

Hi Andrew,

I've got some issues and with many debug.Log I found where it comes from.

In the script "AndroidMediaPlayer" and the method "Play()", the value returned by "GetCurrentTimeMs()" is not the same before and after the "m_Video.Call("Play");"
It can changes from 0.1 secondes to 4 seconds
If the video is playing when I use the "Seek" method I've the same issue.

It only appears on Android. Can you help me ?

 

It looks like the issue might be Web VR disabling CameraMain when in VR mode, and using CameraL and CamerR. Any advice on how to set up the video to adapt to either case?

 

Hi, I have this playlist and it works on VLC and Chrome extensions,

https://manifest.googlevideo.com/ap...SDlhK6yib3PUIJpG79vuDrE-G/playlist/index.m3u8


But inside Unity on the player I only get a loop like this:

I tried al paraneters on the inspector and nothing works, I'm using youtube-dl to get the m3u8 from

Any ideas?

 

Here is my situation: Some videos work well on my Win 7 computer; however the same video has audio issue(no sound) or even showing just black or white screen on some. It happened on both Win 7&10. I set the preferred API to Media Foundation. So if I want to solve this case, the only way is suggesting users to install 3rd party codec like LAV filters? By the way, I cannot play some video withe specific resolution like 720x480 or 720x576, the solution is the same? or is there any idea to deal with without installing anything else?

 

Ahh, for 2D you also need to change the shader to force the eye mode to LEFT:



You can do this in code:

Helper.SetupStereoEyeModeMaterial(meshRenderer.material, StereoEye.Left);

and then to return to stereo:

Helper.SetupStereoEyeModeMaterial(meshRenderer.material, StereoEye.Both);

...
Or maybe I'm misunderstanding you. The code I shared last time should work...

mediaPlayer.m_StereoPacking = StereoPacking.None;
applyToMesh.ForceUpdate();

Thanks,

 

I did some tests here and it seemed to work fine. I had Progress Mode set to Before Finish, Progress Time set to 1.0 and the Transition duration set to 1.0 and set to a Black transition.

If you're still having issues perhaps you could share your project with us for testing. Otherwise maybe your approach of handling the transition yourself should be fine.

Thanks,

 

I'm afraid this isn't possible. This feature will come in version 2.0 which will be out at some point......still lots of work to do.

 

That's strange. Perhaps you could email us your project, or give us more detail - I'm out of ideas. It should just work.....

 

No update yet. This will be supported in AVPro Video 2.0, but that's still some time away.

 

Yes, on Android there is - you can specify them as JSON please look at this thread:
https://github.com/RenderHeads/UnityPlugin-AVProVideo/issues/87

On Windows this isn't possible yet.

Thanks,

 

WebVR is not something we've tested before. How do you enable this in a build with Unity?

The camera should only matter if you have a stereo video - is that the case?
Is the problem that the video eye mapping isn't correct?
It is the job of UpdateStereoMaterial component to handle this, but it does need to know which is the central eye camera. You would have to add some script logic to assign the correct camera for the case of WebVR.

 

Thanks for reporting this.

Which version of AVPro Video and Unity?

Could you please post the issue on our GitHub issues here, with as much detail as possible so we can easily replicate it, and work on a solution.
https://github.com/RenderHeads/UnityPlugin-AVProVideo

Thanks,

 

No yet - it is a complicated change.
You can follow the progress or post more information with the issue here:
https://github.com/RenderHeads/UnityPlugin-AVProVideo/issues/66

Thanks,

 

Is this on macOS? If it is, then this is a known issue with the trial version. It affects certain Mac machines, but only with the trial version and only when using the Metal graphics API.

so the solution is:
1) Buy the product
2) Switch from Metal to OpenGL (in the Player Settings)

If you aren't on macOS then please let me know more details (platform, Unity version, AVPro Video version etc)

Thanks,

 

I would need to know more information about these videos that you want to play - what codecs do they use? which contains formats are they in? Same for the audio - what codec, how many channels?

Windows 7 only natively supports some formats....If you want to support more formats then you need to install the codecs (LAV Filters is the best 3rd party codecs).

On Windows 10 it has support for more formats (via Media Foundation).

I can't say more than that without having specs of the media you're having trouble playing. Please feel free to open an issue on our GitHub:
https://github.com/RenderHeads/UnityPlugin-AVProVideo/issues/

Thanks,

 

Black screen on Demo_uGUI on Android phones

Problem description:
Using your base scene with your base video on S7Edge and it just a black screen with audio.
Tested using Unity 2019.1.7f1. Retested it on Unity 2017 and it works completely fine

Device (which devices are you having the issue with - model, OS version number):
Try with multiple devices and it has the same bug. S7Edge was 8.0.

Media (tell us about your videos - number of videos, resolution, codec, frame-rate, example URLs):
The default scene with default video (BigBunny)

System Information:
AVPro Video: plugin v1.9.17t scripts v1.9.17
Target Platform: Android
Unity: v2019.1.7f1 WindowsEditor
OS: Desktop - GL63 8RD (Micro-Star International Co., Ltd.) - Windows 10 (10.0.0) 64bit - English
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8750H CPU @ 2.20GHz - 12 threads - 8037KB
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti - NVIDIA - Direct3D 11.0 [level 11.1] - 4021KB - 16384

Already try using media player, exo player, multithread off/on

 

Yes, I was using the mobile plugins for ios & android and exporting to them showed me the exact behavior you described as the video is playing ok in both of them but no in OSX unity IDE.
After that we purchased the bundle and the issue is now gone for all platforms.

THANK YOU!

 

Hmm that's strange. A few questions:

1) Do you have OES enabled (in Android settings on MediaPlayer)? This feature isn't enabled in the trial version and will cause blank screen
2) Do any of our demo scenes run?

If you're still having issues, please consider posting this to our issue system:
https://github.com/RenderHeads/UnityPlugin-AVProVideo

Thanks,

 

I was still using a stereo material (it's monoscopic 360), but with that changed I still have the same issues.
I'm currently playing from a Smooth Streaming / Progressive HTTP manifest, but was encountering the same issues when playing from StreamingAssets.
The server is allowing CORS connections from all domains.
I did uncheck Auto Graphics API in Player Settings and am using Web GL 1.0.
Here are my Player and Sphere settings:



In Firefox I'm getting the following warnings/errors (which are consistent with what i was getting before changing eye mode):
HTTP “Content-Type” of “application/vnd.ms-sstr+xml” is not supported. Load of media resource https://grxmedia-usct.streaming.med...Amanda_v4_Final_360-android-3840.ism/manifest failed. index.html
Error: video not supported (errorcode=4) color:red; raven.js:93:31
[AVProVideo] Error: Loading failed. File not found, codec not supported, video resolution too high or insufficient system resources. (Filename: ./Runtime/Export/Debug/Debug.bindings.h Line: 48) raven.js:93:31
Cannot play media. No decoders for requested formats: application/vnd.ms-sstr+xml

Thanks for your help!

 

Hello, having a little problem...

Problem description:

All Android 9 devices are freezing the videos for a good time before continue, multiples times.
Using logcat we have this error:

Sending non-protected broadcast ON_VOWIFI_AVALUABLE_CHAGNGED from system 3560:com.android.phone/1001 pkg com.android.phone

java.lang.Throwable

    at com.android.server.am.ActivityManagerService.checkBroadcastFromSystem(ActivityManagerService.java:21419)

    at com.android.server.am.ActivityManagerService.broadcastIntentLocked(ActivityManagerService.java:21930)

    at com.android.server.am.ActivityManagerService.broadcastIntent(ActivityManagerService.java:22165)

    at android.app.IActivityManager$Stub.onTransact$broadcastIntent$(IActivityManager.java:10171)

    at android.app.IActivityManager$Stub.onTransact(IActivityManager.java:167)

    at com.android.server.am.ActivityManagerService.onTransact(ActivityManagerService.java:3348)

    at android.os.Binder.execTransact(Binder.java:731)

Device (which devices are you having the issue with - model, OS version number):

All android 9

Media (tell us about your videos - number of videos, resolution, codec, frame-rate, example URLs):

All videos been streamed by vimeo, mostly 360 videos.

System Information:

AVPro Video: plugin v1.9.12t scripts v1.9.17
Target Platform: Android
Unity: v2018.1.9f2 WindowsEditor
OS: Desktop - XPS 8700 (Dell Inc.) - Windows 10 (10.0.0) 64bit - Portuguese
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4770 CPU @ 3.40GHz - 8 threads - 8143KB
GPU: Emulated GPU running OpenGL ES 3.0 - Emulated - OpenGL ES 3.0 [emulated] - 994KB - 4096

 

Hmmm..I've never heard of anyone using HTML5 video to play back Micrsoft Smooth Streaming source...I'm not sure that any browsers actually support that? HLS and Dash are much better supported.

 

Thanks for reporting this. We haven't seen this in our tests.
If you're having issues please add it to our GitHub issues page:
https://github.com/RenderHeads/UnityPlugin-AVProVideo

You should also try switching the Video API setting (in Android section on MediaPlayer component) to see whether that makes a difference.

The error above doesn't seem to have anthing to do with our player.

Perhaps you could also give more information, such as a video of what these freezes are looking like, and ideally use our demo scenes + media so we can easily try to replicate the problem.

Thanks,

 

No, OES is disabled.
No, none of the demo seems to run.

It run if I build it using 2017, it runs on PC 2019. I hope we can find a solution cause I may need this player for my upcoming project. The video is more transparent than black I guess. It just shows nothing if that helps. The audio works and there no error on the debug.

Also is a new empty project. I tried with 2019.1.1f and 2019.1.7f and it's the same issue. There has to be something I'm missing.

It can't be just me right, I did try with other phones.

 

That seemed to clear it up! Thanks again!

 

That's bizarre....I'm not really sure what else to suggest...it should just work. Do you get any error messages in the ADB LOG CAT? Maybe check colour space is set to Gamma...Sounds like you might have to open up a ticket on our github.

Thanks,

 

Well it's a new empty project, so my color space is Gamma. No, I debug using LogCat and a plugin called LogViewer and there 0 error on it. Dang .

Is there a build settings I need to follow? Although all my settings are default now. Texture compression etc.

Update, Vulcan seem to be causing all these problems. Unity 2019 by default, the Auto Graphic API is off and Vulcan is default included. Maybe put this in FAQ, took me two days to figure this out.

Including OPENGLES 3.0 / 2.0 seems to work better than Auto Graphic API on. When Auto Graphic API is on, the video flickers abit during the startup. Not sure why but just giving you some details on it.

 

Hey there!
I'm testing the trial version for a VR project, and the performance seems to be much better than Unity's own video player (probably due to hardware acceleration kicking in)

However, I've run into some issues:
- The video is upside down. My video file is in over-under stereo format, and I'm trying to feed the texture directly into my own shader through my own script. (EDIT: I flipped the material y-axis scale to make the texture right side up, but I now see that the left/right eye is switched... Do I have to rewrite my shader? For both Windows and Android? This seems overly complicated when all I want is the frame as a texture like with Unity's Video Player...)
- Changing the playback rate seems to halt playback for a few frames. I'm using a coroutine to sample a curve to speed ramp the video from 0 to 1 as it starts. This works fine with Unity's video player. But changing the playback rate each frame in AVPro grinds Unity to a halt (from 200fps -> 3fps).
- I need mipmaps. I found the setting to generate mipmaps on Windows, but there doesn't seem to be an equivalent setting for Android. I haven't tried to build for Andorid yet, but can you confirm that there is mipmaps on Android? Or do I have to blit to a new texture or something..?
- Low FPS. My video is 59.94 fps, and the scene is rendered at 200+ fps, but AVPro's display rate is around 45 fps in editor (when I tried to build and run I didn't get an image at all... which I'm assuming is a limitation of the trial version?). I tried to downscale the video all the way down to 128x144 pixels but it didn't make a difference for AVPro's display rate.

Using AVPro 1.9.17 trial version, Unity 2019.1.5f1 with LWRP, Windows10+Android, GTX1060
(h264 128x144 59.94 baseline 7Mbps level 5.2)

 

Hello.

I'm trying to play video of MKV, only sound but no image, how do I fix that?

Plug version: av pro video Version 1.9.17 demo
System version：windos

Video Information：
video type: mkv
video decoder: RV40
Audio decoder: AAC

 

Hi --

I'm curious if you can think of some way of determining this information through the plugin:
1) Something that can determine what codec a video file was encoded with
2) Something that can tell me if during playback there were dropped frames and their frequency

 

Updated to latest version of AVPro (1.9.17) and Unity (2019.1.8f1) and i am still getting the same problem. What kind of details would you need?

Edit: Report made at https://github.com/RenderHeads/UnityPlugin-AVProVideo/issues/98

 

Thanks, I'l glad you found the solution. We will add some sort of detection+warning for this case.

 

If your platform was Android then I would suspect that OES is enabled (this isn't supported in the trial version). Go to your MediaPlayer compoent, then in the Platform Specific > Android section, untick the OES option.

Your platform seems to be Windows though, and it could be a format issue. You said the format is "RV40" which is an old RealPlayer format - nobody supports this...You probably need to convert it to H.264 or H.265 (HEVC).

Thanks,

 

We don't have anything to support either of these I'm afraid...

 

thanks for all of these details.

 

Hi Andrew. Does AV Pro provide the API to switch video API (DirectShow or MediaFoundation) on Windows? In our application, we edited LAV filter to support the Chinese AVS video standard and use it within DirectShow and your plugin to play some 4K-resolution videos. However, we also need to play some higher-resolution videos, like in 6K or even above, but in regular H265 format. In that situation, DirectShow with LAV filter doesn't have enough performance so that we want to switch to MediaFoundation. Is it possible during app running? Thanks in advance.

 

Yes you can do that. You would have to recreate the MediaPlayer component though, as once it has been used it is locked to that API. Here's how to change the API in code before you load a video:

Code (CSharp):

1. mediaPlayer.PlatformOptionsWindows.videoApi = Windows.VideoApi.MediaFoundation;

 

Thanks Andrew! I'll look into your suggestions

 

I have seen and tried that API while it doesn't work without recreating the MediaPlayer component. But actually I don't know how to do that yet. Currently, we set up the MediaPlayer directly in the scene and reference it as a public member in related scripts. Should I create a new MediaPlayer class object? It seems not easy since there are a lot of initializing code, including our own such as binding it with a rendering GameObject and setting some configurations for VR videos.

 

Another option would be to have a second MediaPlayer component that is pre-configured. You should then be able to switch your other components to use that one once it has loaded the video. On the other MediaPlayer you can call CloseVideo() to free its memory.

 

Is this solution applicable to VR stereo? When I tried this method the video only shows on right eye and left eye became black. By the way, the 3d video we made is in top and bottom mode so it does make sense to change the stereo mode of shader "AVProVideo-VR-InsideSphere-AndroidOES" to top_bottom.
The way I am doing for changing 3d video back to non-3d(normal) video is the following:

Code (CSharp):

1. public class ShaderManager : MonoBehaviour
2. {
3.     [SerializeField] Material material3D;      //AVProVideo-VR-InsideSphere-AndroidOES
4.     [SerializeField] Material material2D;      //AVProVideo-VR-InsideSphere
5.     MeshRenderer meshRenderer;
6.     Renderer render;
7.     private bool isInThreeDMode;
8.     ApplyToMesh applyToMesh;
9.  
10.     void Start()
11.     {
12.         render = GetComponent<Renderer>();
13.         meshRenderer = GetComponent<MeshRenderer>();
14.         applyToMesh = GetComponent<ApplyToMesh>();
15.         isInThreeDMode = false;
16.     }
17.  
18.     void Update()
19.     {
20.         if((Input.GetKeyDown(KeyCode.Space) || OVRInput.GetDown(OVRInput.Button.PrimaryIndexTrigger))&& !isInThreeDMode)
21.         {
22.             isInThreeDMode = true;        
23.             render.material = material2D;
24.             applyToMesh.ForceUpdate();
25.         }
26.         else if ((Input.GetKeyDown(KeyCode.Space) || OVRInput.GetDown(OVRInput.Button.PrimaryIndexTrigger)) && isInThreeDMode)
27.         {
28.             isInThreeDMode = false;
29.             render.material = material3D;
30.             applyToMesh.ForceUpdate();
31.         }      
32.     }
33. }
34.  

But the result is bad as I said at above. The 3d video does show correctly but when changing back to normal video it only shows at right eye.

 

You shouldn't mix OES and non-OES shaders. OES is a very special mode - I'm not sure why you're trying to mix them. If you want to switch between two materials, you can do this, but they should use the same shader type - this per-material you can change the eye-mode etc. If you are using OES, then for the 2D mode you should use the "AVProVideo-Unlit-AndroidOES" shader.

 

Hi All,

AVPro Video version 1.10.0 has just been released!

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

Changes include:

macOS / iOS / tvOS

• Improved memory handling so all texture memory is freed when the media player is destroyed

iOS

• Fixed issue where app regaining focus doesn’t resume playback

Android

• Improved loading with file offsets - now works from Android Asset Bundles, file:// URL scheme, OBB and ZIP files
• Added custom HTTP header support to ExoPlayer path
• Fixed a couple of issues that could cause blank frames or playback to not appear
• Calling Play() ExoPlayer can now resume playback once a dropped network connection has been restored
• Fixed the transparent lit shader being upside-down on Android
• Fixed issue where FirstFrameReady event could trigger without a valid texture or zero width/height values
• Fixed audio going out of sync when looping local videos using the ExoPlayer API path
• Buffering event now fires on first video load
• Improved thread safety and various internal logic for improved stability
• Added detection and warning message for Vulkan usage (not supported)

General

• Support window updated to post issues to GitHub page

Thanks to everyone that reported bugs that were fixed in this release

Please report any issues here on the forum, or preferably to our Github Issue tracker

Thanks,

 

Hi guys,

I have an issue that I've posted to the Github Issue Tracker here, but thought I'd put it up here in case anyone has any quick fixes. (https://github.com/RenderHeads/UnityPlugin-AVProVideo/issues/119)

Basically I'm using MediaPlayer.ExtractFrame to grab screen shots from movies we've recorded using the native camera on iOS and Android. On Android this code works fine, but on iOS the screenshot comes out with what looks like only the red channel as you can see in the attached image.

I've attached the source video file in the bug report as well.

Any ideas on what might cause this?

Cheers

 

The AV Pro guys responded to the above issue on Github, just thought I'd post it here in case anyone else encounters this issue.

The iOS media player by default uses a bi-planar texture format for movie playback which is currently unsupported by the extract frames feature.
However you can work around this by unchecking “Use YpCbCr420” in the iOS specific section of the media player settings. This puts the player back to using standard RGBA textures which will work with the extract frames feature.
​

I can confirm this work around worked for me.

 

I had user issues with AV Pro about 2 years back and reverted back to Unity Native Video - but Unity Video has gone nowhere and the Unity default quality is horrible. I now suspect it may have been the compression codec I used for the videos that causes some issues for users and not AV Pro.

AV PRO team, Can you give me a run down on the best video/audio codec setup for compatibility - Windows XP through Windows 10. I am using mp4 as the container and I am searching for maximum compatibility through those Windows versions.

 

Hi AndrewRH, we are using AVPro and find a problem on iOS device. When the vedio is playing, with the headphone connecting, then unplug the headphone, the operation above cause the vedio pause. Is there any way to keep the vedio playing on iOS device when unplugging the headphone? This does not happen on android devices. Hope to hear you !

 

Hi,

I am looking for a simple solution to showcase and distribute 360 videos. Can the "Curved UI" asset be used with AVPRO Video? If not, would you have any asset recommendation that would complement AVPRO Video to do this?
I like the AVPRO asset a lot but it would be amazing if you could provide a demo scene with a basic movie selector menu.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

 

Hi,

I've tried free version.
But movie playback sample is strange. Please see a video above.
Is this restriction of free trial version?
Purchased version doesn't have this problem?

Btw, I have one more question.
I want to extract frame pixels faster than real-time.
Could this do that?
I want to extract frame pixels from a video and store to image files.
No real-time.

Thanks.