Question Videoplayer stutters and speeds up in build, but plays fine in editor

I have a 1920x1080 30fps mp4 video I use as a cutscene inbetween 2 levels (scenes).
I do this by loading a scene that has only a camera, a videoplayer and a small script that loads the next scene after the video is done playing.
The videoplayer is set to PlayOnAwake and WaitForFirstFrame.
It seems to work fine in the editor, but when I make a build, the video starts slowly (stuttering), then suddenly speeds up.
Which is exactly the kind of behaviour I would expect could happen if WaitForFirstFrame was set to false, but as I said, it's set to true.

Any idea what can cause this, and how to fix it?

I'm using Unity2019.3,
It's for a Windows build

 

Anyone?

 

Any help?

 

Does no one else have this issue?

 

Hi Steven,

Are you using the .Prepare() method and waiting for isPrepared = true; on the video player before running .Play()? It could be that the video is still loading when .Play() is called, and taking a few seconds to loading before catching back up to speed.

Let me know!

 

Yes, I have tried that as well, even thought according to the docs I shouldn't have to, as I've set WaitForFirstFrame to true.
But it makes no difference anyway, the video still stutters even if I only start playing it after waiting for isPrepared to be true.

 

ah that is annoying, how are you loading the video clip in? Is it loaded by Addressables or StreamingAssets, or dragged and dropped into the video player in the scene? Do you know what codec the video uses as well? We've had a few video issues and sometimes encoding them differently would give quite different results. I would also take a quick look at the profiler to make sure nothing's going on that you're not expecting during that scene load up!

 

It's a local video, assigned in the inspector, so it's part of the build, I would expect that to work better than loading it externally.
The codec is H.264, and it's 30 fps.
I should also mention that Unity messes up the audio: only the left side remains, the right is silent, which is not the case when watching the video in any other player.

I'll have a look at it with the profiler.

 

nothing?

 

I have similar framedrop issues when I build our app for standalone. It used to run fine in unity 2018, but since we moved to unity 2020 we have this issues. Did you ever try it on a newer version of unity? And did you ever try to contact Unity about it?

 

The weird thing is in the Editor is actually works okay. Not great but still okay.
But the build (made with the unity2020) has real performance issues. Here are the profiler stats when running in the editor and controlling the video using my Playbar and setting the VideoPlayer.time property.

And by the way, thanks for getting back. I didn't think anybody would reply here. It's nice to see that you guys care to help.

 

I managed today to upgrade our project to the latest Unity 2021 version (2.8.f1) and I still have the same issue:
Poor video performance, especially in the Build. The editor is still kinda okay.
In all cases, using the Play() function, the video runs really smooth, even in the build. The only problem is when I use videoplayer.time (or frame). I tried many different video files (different resolutions, different file sizes etc.), all with the same result.
And again, it still works very well with Unity 2018, especially when building the app.

Please let me know if you think I should report this bug, and how to report it?

 

Yes, absolutely, thanks for looking into it.

1. Unity Editor 2018 (works fine):
https://www.dropbox.com/s/zmutqe1til3d7mm/unityEditor2018.mp4?dl=0

2. Standalone Mac app, made with Unity 2018 (works even better than in the Editor2018):
https://www.dropbox.com/s/xsacwkv0w15ixu5/standalone2018.mp4?dl=0

3. Unity Editor 2020 (works still okay):
https://www.dropbox.com/s/cw81wumfu4bxt32/unityEditor2020.mp4?dl=0

4. Standalone Mac app, made with Unity 2020 and same results in Unity 2021 (frames are very slowly being loaded. Only in Playmode they run totally fine. But when searching with the Playbar for the frame, the framerate "of the video" is really low):
https://www.dropbox.com/s/da991s03eckhfj7/standalone2020.mp4?dl=0

The only thing that comes into my mind is that some Build "quality" settings in Unity2020 might have changed and could affect the performance, but I have no idea which settings that could be. Any idea?

 

Hi, Sorry for my late reply. I tried our project now with the beta of Unity 2022 and here's the result is okay. It seems to be better than Unity 2021, but still a lot worse than the performance we achieved with 2018. Here's a recorded video of a test:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/pzo65mjoxatcthx/standalone2022.mp4?dl=0

Would this fix eventually be available in Unity 2020.3 or would we have to go to Unity 2022?

 

Thanks for getting back and for showing how it's supposed to be used. I didn't find it this detailed in the documentary. I'm basically only using VideoPlayer.time to get the frame, but I try to make sure that I don't do that every update by comparing the calculated frame:

Code (CSharp):

1. public void UpdateVideoFrameTo (float time, float maxTime)
2.     {
3.         // maxFrames is VideoPlayer.frameCount
4.         calculatedFrame = (long)(maxFrames / maxTime * time);
5.  
6.         if (calculatedFrame != currentFrame)
7.         {
8.             currentFrame = calculatedFrame;
9.             //vp.frame = currentFrame;      // vp.frame doesn't work as good as vp.time, because sometimes it kinda just resets the video and then start from the beginning
10.             //print(currentFrame);
11.             vp.time = time;
12.         }
13.     }

What I should mention is that before I use this function in my slider, I pause the video once using VideoPlayer.Pause().
Do you see any issue with my implementation?

 

What you see in my code is everything I do in terms of video manipulation.
I don't use the function seek() and I don't use seekCompleted().
Should I check seekCompleted() every time before I even start looking for new frames? Would that help with processing the setting of vp.time?

 

1. The VideoPlayer is paused.
2. As you can see in my code I only search for new frames and do not repeatedly search for old frames. So I am not searching if it is still seeking.

Thanks for the help, but I kinda think we are stuck here. Is this now considered a bug that is going to be fixed or not?

 

Ok, thanks.
So this means, nobody has yet reported this bug?

It will take me some time to create a minimal reproduction case project. But I will try to report it as soon as I can.

 

I have reported the bug now. Looking forward to hearing from your team and getting it fixed soon.
Cheers!

 

I have reported the bug over a month ago, with a minimum reproduction project. I didn't receive any answer in the bug reporter ticket by the unity team. Is anybody going to take a look at this? It is really annoying since this is an important feature in our app for many years now, and I'm sure it could be fixed in no time since it use to work perfectly back in unity 2018. As reported I have tried every other version since and it is still working very badly. Please let your support team take a look at the reported bug. The case-nr is: 1422101 Thank you!

 

Hi, thanks for the reply. I used your code and it doesn't work, it seems like you missed pasting something.
Anyway, I worked around understanding how you implemented waiting for the end of the Frame, but the performance is still very weak when running the Mac Build. Here's my code:

Code (CSharp):

1. public void UpdateVideoFrameTo(float time, float maxTime)
2.     {
3.         //print("jumpt to frame: " + (long)(maxFrames / maxTime * time));
4.  
5.         if (seekDone)
6.         {
7.             calculatedFrame = (long)(maxFrames / maxTime * time);
8.  
9.             if (calculatedFrame == 0)   // Because 0 gives a black frame, but I want the video to show the first frame
10.             {
11.                 calculatedFrame = 1;
12.             }
13.  
14.  
15.             if (calculatedFrame != currentFrame)
16.             //if (Mathf.Abs(calculatedFrame - currentFrame) > 0.01f)
17.             {
18.                 currentFrame = calculatedFrame;
19.                 vp.frame = currentFrame;
20.                 print(currentFrame);
21.  
22.                 seekDone = false;
23.                 StartCoroutine(WaitToUpdateRenderTextureBeforeEndingSeek());
24.             }
25.         }
26.     }
27.     IEnumerator WaitToUpdateRenderTextureBeforeEndingSeek()
28.     {
29.         yield return new WaitForEndOfFrame();
30.         seekDone = true;
31.     }

In my implementation I used frame instead of time, as it's more straight forward to me. Does that make any difference to the performance?

 

If it's not a problem, please upload the whole script with all your changes, so I can see why you say the performance is better on your end. Waiting for the end of the frame didn't help. I guess my implementation is just not ideal.

 

Thanks for the code, it's not a problem at all to share that class.

I tested it, and it does seem like a small improvement, but it's still a very poor performance on the video component, compared to how it used to be. So that's not solving the problem for us, especially with our new video analysis features that need to have a fluently performing player in order to interact with other GameObjects in the scene.

To show you the difference using that same clip, here is a comparison:
1. using the reported bug project and your code in unity 2020 (running even with a small window to improve performance):
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ab56lyvodbihhn7/unity2020VideoPerformance.mp4?dl=0

2. using our old app, which was released using unity 2018 (running in Fullscreen!):
https://www.dropbox.com/s/0odwh0gfg9vxzil/oldAppVideoPerformance.mp4?dl=0

The difference is still huge. So it must be something else that is causing this issue. Can you please dig deeper to find out how unity 2018 worked differently? It's a real step back for our customers. The performance issue is on other systems as well, but tremendously on Mac. I really hope you can see that.

Kind regards

 

Our platform exists since 2015 with mp4 being the required format, so our whole database and customers' devices are filled with only files of that format. So thanks, but that is not an option. Please help us find the reason for this performance loss of the Unity VideoPlayer component.

 

Okay, I understand. Thanks for taking this seriously, as it is damaging our business. Looking forward to hearing if you will have an estimation of when this could be fixed for Unity 2020, so we can plan a bugfix update for our customers.

 

Thanks. Let me know if there will be something to test on my end.
I am going to release our app as it is now. I found a really weird side effect that I wanted you to know, maybe it will hint to you in which direction to investigate next. And that is, I realized, that loading times (until the video component isPrepared) take very long with the built Mac app. But there is a trick how to make that instantly, and that is by going out of the screen with the mouse. I'm attaching a video of our app to demonstrate that. And I can assure you that I don't ever look for where the mouse is. So there must be something the Unity player is doing when I exit the Windowed app that forces the video component to load the frame.
Check out at the end of the video, I'm even dragging the timeline outside the window and it reacts much much faster. Even though not as fast as we are aiming for, but I think this might help you find the issue.
Here's the clip:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/s9371jnbedqsmsi/videoPerformance.mp4?dl=0

Enjoy your 2 weeks! Looking forward to hearing from you when you're back.

 

Hi, I just wanted to see if you had time to check it out? Did you see the hint I sent you in my post above and did that help?
Cheers

 

Okay, thank you so much for your effort. Fingers crossed you will find the issue. Looking forward to hearing from you. Cheers!

 

Hi, thank you for your update. I saw that a new ticket was opened regarding my case on a new platform (Unity Bug Reporting Portal using Atlassian).
Yes, Windows also has the issue, but when testing on Mac it's worse. Let me know if I can be of any help!
Kind regards

 

By the way, shortly after the ticket got opened I got an email from QA saying that the "Customer QA just finished investigating" with a survey on my experience. I'm not sure what I am supposed to do with it, since I think the case is still ongoing. Or am I wrong? Let me know if a fix is out already.
Cheers!

 

Hi, sorry to bother you, we are just releasing a new Update, so I was wondering how you guys are progressing? Just in case we could add the Unity fixes into this Update.

Cheers!

 

Any updates here? We are noticing the exact same issue

 

Any updates as to which version of unity has fixed this issue? I am working in Unity 2022.2.1 and still have severe performance issues when playing specific video files, as well as searching for frames on the time bar.

I first thought the issue was fixed with unity 2022, but then realized that still quite a lot files are not playing well. So I guess it is now depending on the data in the video. Our customers converted a whole lot of videos in the past, these videos now don't run smoothly with this player.

I understand that you can't guarantee that the video player will work on all files, but every other videoplayer I have plays those videos perfectly fine, and so did our app that was released with an earlier version.

Can you please let me know where we can check on any progress? I had a confirmed issue tracker but nobody ever replied in that ticket.