Has anyone made any serious tests with the video support in unity so far?
I’m asking because i did some tests on two days and the result was sobering.
Beside of the already written lack of common fileformat support ( and the so needed conversions), the unsatisfying import settings, i ran into the following issues whilst trying out different file formats/containers/settings and filesizes:
a) Unity tries to import a videofile but doesn’t succeed so you end up with no file after it went through the whole conversion process, can’t remember if the negative filesizes are a 100% indication for this.
b) Sound isn’t working properly as it either doesn’t play at all or is pitched wrongly.
c) Sounds work (althouh wrongly pitched) in the IDE but aren’t available in the webplayer, instead there is silence.
d) Films which work at smaller sizes aren’t working at larger sizes anymore.
e) Streaming can sometimes hang the machine for some time.
f) Sounds are pitched properly but aren’t in sync.
g) Sounds can’t be accessed via script anymore like it worked in the first v2 release, instead they are mute now.
well strictly speaking Unity does support importing of any format that quicktime supports. It just converts it to ogg to use. That way your end user doesn’t need ANY other codec installed. Otherwise you run into that whole need to bundle the quicktime installer with you distributed players. Something I for one is very happy not to worry about anymore, like the bad old days when authoring anything with iShell and to a certain extent Director.
If it is falling over in the conversion then you need to send the offending file to UT for testing… also it could be quicktime spitting the dumbing as well… have you tried converting with quicktime player?
Aside from that I’ve had no problems with video in Unity 2… aside from the lack of features exposed in the API for controlling and manipulating video I’m happy with their implementation.
No time to fiddle around with this today, just an answer…
Would have been interested if it’s a just my system or anyone else has problems with it too - podperson? I also haven’t experienced issues with some movies here and there but as soon as you try out a wider range they show up, beside of that the sound sync/pitch thing mostly is an issue here.
A x to 1 conversion for sure is the right thing to do but the format isn’t good as it’s not common and you can’t access widely spread content (on2VP6, h.264) directly without a time consuming and a loss in quality conversion. Not the perfect solution if you for instance have to prepare a FLV file for Unity usage, just to show itagain on the net.
And just to round this up, it would be very helpful if Unity would ship with an external encoding tool, like Flash does, in order to enable the user to do the encoding process outside of unity and a) enable easy drag&drop queue defintions for more than just one movie and b) this would be crossplatform in order to support situations like when you’re having a slow or normal mac but a number crunching pc right next to you.
Also there are plenty of commandline tools availble for free that convert arbitrary formats to ogg. Most of them have quite extensive quality settings.
I got reports from several people that it’s also not working on their systems as well, so it doesn’t seem to be only my system.
Also there are plenty of commandline tools availble for free that convert arbitrary formats to ogg. Most of them have quite extensive quality settings.
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Two things, a) providing the information in the docs in a video section (Were are the tools (links to them)?, How do i do it?) and b) this is about enhancing the workflow and as not everyone is running around with a Cleaner licence, providing such tools would enhance the situation for those who need it. There is a reason why flash provides this functionality.