All,
I’m sorry and apologize in advance if this has been covered already. I haven’t seen (or simply missed) much discussion of third party plug-in support. I read the thread by joeyjr and the excellent responses by taumel and NCarter concerning support for Flash: http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=8515
But I was wondering if there was support for something like MP3 files stored on a server somewhere, embedded within a game. Or .mpeg and .mov files that can be streamed from the Internet.
Unity 2.0 lets you stream audio and video over an internet connection. It only supports Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora format to do this, but converts any sound or video file you drop into Assets to Ogg and lets you export the imported Ogg asset as well.
If the sound and video will be distributed with your Unity app, it’s easiest to convert it all to the Ogg Vorbis and Theora formats.
If you want users to playback their own media, you should research building an Assembly/DLL and Bundle that hook into Windows Media and Quicktime respectively.
Yoggy and Shaun,
Thanks for the replies and the information. Yes, I a indeed familiar with the Ogg format.
I has hoping to embed a Flash player from UTube within a Unity environment. Kind of like rooms where the walls would have some video streaming, embedded players from UTube and DivX sites. From Shaun’s post, I get the impression that I may be capable of getting something to work, but with a good deal of driver and library hook development.
What you might be interested in is the HTML Texture plugin that one of the guys here was developing.
It basically fired up a background browser process and buffered the screen into a Texture in Unity. It was Mac only, but seemed to be working - although I’ve not tried it personally.
Generally as the others already said before there is no direct support for mp3s - sadly the same situation like on the video side (on2VP6/h.264) which makes it unpleasant communicating with client data stored on servers. Also keep in mind that if you’re interested in a solution which should work on the windows side as well only the minority has quicktime installed there.
I looked into building a plugin that talks to windows media for playing back MP3’s for my app - and it turned out to be more of a pain in the arse than I expected.
I’m still a bit perplexed that every other game engine supports MP3 as a bare minimum, and at least some of the more general video formats - but Unity chooses Ogg.
Don’t get me wrong, Ogg is cool - and the licensing is even better. But I’m sure it wouldn’t be too hard for Unity to support a bit more variety, and make a lot of people happy
