I have read that the video player is slow in Unity. Is there anything I can do to optimize it or is there any planned updates to it. I have looked around for information on the website and the roadmap but have seen nothing yet.
Hi!
The VideoPlayer’s performance is a function of what the media playback/decoding libraries bundled with the platform can do. Most implementations use the fastest code path available, which means decoding is accelerated with the use of graphics hardware. The latest addition in this area is the Windows/UWP implementation which is now hardware accelerated, both on DX11 an DX12 in 2019.3.
There is not much you can do on your end to speed things up if you’ve found a scenario that you observe is too slow for your requirements. You can obviously select a lower resolution or frame rate if this is acceptable in your context.
You can also submit a bug report if you find a situation where a native media player on your system can play a source without trouble while Unity’s VideoPlayer doesn’t keep up. We try to address these situations as bandwidth permits, keeping in mind that certain design decisions of Unity’s VideoPlayer favor flexibility over highest performance (also depending on platform).
Hope this helps!
Dominique Leroux
A/V developer at Unity
1 Like
thank you so much for this valuable information!
This was helpful. Thank you. I would like to know if there are any planned changes to look forward to but your response more than covered most of my concerns.
Hi again!
There are no short term plans for performance improvements, as we are not aware of actual performance problems; please let us know if you can observe the opposite. Or course, there are bugs that we are regularly fixing, but these don’t fall into the category of optimization or performance enhancements.
Have a nice day!
Dominique
1 Like