[VideoPlayer] Transcoding issue with Windows 7

Unity Engine
1

Hi all !

Yesterday I have been confronted to a weird issue with the cutscenes of our game. First, a bit of context :

  • The game is meant to run on Windows 7 only (custom arcade machines) and rather old hardware (Dell Optiplex 780 Core 2 Duo)
  • The game is built with 2019.4.10f1
  • It was shipped successfully before. The problem described below is new and was observed while we were working on a patch for an issue that was totally unrelated to cutscenes (same project, same Unity version, same everything)
  • The video clips that we use for the game are .mp4, 960x720, 30 fps
  • Transcoding is enabled for all clips (H264)

Our problem :

I issued a new build, tested it on my Windows 10 machine. Everything worked perfectly well. When I installed it on the target hardware (Windows 7), there were simply no cutscenes.
After a bit of logging, I realized that the VideoPlayers had only 1 frame (frameCount) and the current frame was systematically -1. Which I presume reflects a problem with the video file itself or the way it was loaded in RAM. So I started looking into the VideoClips themselves…

Two things that worked for me :

  • Disabling transcoding worked and cutscenes were back again on our Win7 machine.
  • Re-enabling transcoding and then building from another computer (the one I used to build on last time we shipped) works as well.

But for some reason, with transcoding enabled, and built from my current office computer, the VideoClips are loaded and work fine while running on Windows 10, but not on Windows 7…

Any ideas on what could be the reason for that ?

Have a great day

2

I assume you’ve resolved this by now, but thought I’d chime in.
Transcoding isn’t necessary if the videos are in the correct format to begin with. Transcoding just takes the video and reformats it. In my experience, that gets lossy and the videos don’t work as well. I would not enable it unless you find it necessary.
Windows 7 is finicky. It doesn’t support videos over 1080p. Our project had a couple videos that had to be transcoded to work on win7. I don’t remember exactly why it what changed tho.

I’m curious what the arcade game is, sounds like a cool project.