Playing a game build with the latest Unity on Linux I was unable to use one of the game features being animated backgrounds as enabling this in settings resulted in a black screen. Googling my problem I find this forum and that most video formats are not supported in Linux except webm while this game uses mp4. Replacing those videos with webm made the game too lagy, something that wasn’t a problem before.
So is there any plans for more video files support in the near future ? And what can I do in my case ?
We can’t add mp4 support on Linux because it depends on h.264 and h.265 decoders and Linux doesn’t ship with them built-in (since there’s nobody to pay the licensing fees).
The license terms of that project are pretty problematic, including not being able to include its binaries together with the software, and the remuneration clause:
Is there not a way to check if the library exists on the system, and if so then enable support?
I’d be perfectly fine with asking customers to install openh264, if they want mp4 support.
It’s a gray area. This would also not be applicable to most games as they wouldn’t want to redistribute openh264 (just like we don’t) and it’s really not a great idea to ask gamers to install stuff manually - they expect the install button on Steam to just get the game working. Given all that, we decided to not pursue that avenue.