Problems using MovieTextures - Gets white everytime on Unity Pro trial

Questions & Answers
1

Hi people,

I am using Unity Pro Trial 2.6.1

I have a GUI script with a MovieTexture set up. When clicking on a button, I am setting it to Play(), and then on every frame I am using GUI.DrawTexture to display it.

This actually seems to work; I mean, this postively changes the screen and should work from what I have read elsewhere, however the movie plays in full white. That is, I have a full white screen.

Note that Unity does the same if I try to preview the movie from the Assets libraby, or I build & run.

This should not be because of the Xvid-codec used for the movie, as I have also tried with an uncompressed version of the same movie, with no result.

This also should not be some sort of memory problem since I have tried with short movies and big ones, with the same result.

So:

Is it because of the trial version of Unity Pro? May Unity eventually be able to send me something other than a white screen? What should I do?

Thanks a great lot for your help.

2

I am happy to contribute to the community with an answer to this problem.

So it happens that Unity doesn't import well usual AVIs (like Xvid-codec imported), or at least, that it doesn't it so well on my computer. Unity tries to convert them to OGG/Theora but doesn't quite manage to succeed.

In order to make it to work, I had to download the following:

http://v2v.cc/~j/ffmpeg2theora/download.html

FFMPEGTHEORA is an easy-to-use EXE utility (Mac version also available). With it, I managed to convert AVI and MOV files to the OGG Theora version.

There are other converters around, like "VLC Player" that actually has a conversion system, but VLC-conversion didn't work so well, and FFMPEG did!

Once the file has been converted into OGG/Theora (.OGV, playable with the VLC software or others), I was able to Import the Asset into Unity.

The preview from the library worked and displayed the movie, and the GUI.DrawTexture() worked as well. No more blank screen.

The problem evolved into a "low quality movie playing" problem ; cutscene is HD 1920x1080 and has a very high bitrate (11000 kbits/s), I believe Unity doesn't manage to follow this ouput.

If you have optimization solutions for MovieTextures in Unity, I will gladly take them.