Search Unity

  1. Megacity Metro Demo now available. Download now.
    Dismiss Notice
  2. Unity support for visionOS is now available. Learn more in our blog post.
    Dismiss Notice

Screen Tearing on Linux when Playing Video

Discussion in 'Linux' started by cryingcavecat, Jul 29, 2020.

  1. cryingcavecat

    cryingcavecat

    Joined:
    Mar 20, 2018
    Posts:
    3
    Just to give a little bit of context, we are building a video player application in Unity 2019.4.1f1 - a library of videos from which you can select one to watch. The machine is meant to be single purpose (bar background services that require Linux) so it's being run on a LattePanda Delta with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

    We are using UMP because the Unity video player has very little support for video file types on Linux and we don't want to be forced into a corner with only webm support. Currently we've been running videos as .mp4's and those have played mostly fine. However, upon extended inspection we've noticed screen tearing, primarily when cutting between shots. When playing the video natively in vlc on the desktop the screen tearing is non-existent.

    We have tried using both with and without using external/installed vlc libraries (as this is an option in UMP) - neither seem to help the issue.

    Before trying to play it natively in VLC on the desktop we did a bunch of OS level tweaks (i.e. common screen tearing issues with Ubuntu and Intel, trying different compositors etc). Once none of that completely fixed the issue (it definitely helped with slightly smoother video playback) we decided to check to see how it plays natively in VLC, and as I said previously - the screen tearing is not there in VLC.

    So this leads me to believe that there must be something amongst Unity settings or UMP settings that we can tweak to fix this issue.

    Has anyone else had any experience with tearing in Linux using UMP player or otherwise? Are there other solutions that we could possibly take a look at to get videos of multiple formats playing smoothly on Linux with Unity?