Speed up video play

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And another quality question ;)

As we are rendering everything as fast as possible in our application, and I already figured out how to speed up the animations (look in my other questions), I now switched to movies playing on a plane (or rather on the material).

And while the movie does play, it does so in original speed. Which is what I do not want. I want each frame of the movie played in exactly one frame in the application. Kind of fast forward as fast as the application framerate lets me. I could probably simulate that via script, but a Movie texture only has Play(), Stop(), etc. and does not seem to have any JumpToFrameX() function.

Any idea how I could do that, speeding up a movie clip on a plane? Or, as a possible alternative, go to time/frame X of a movie?

In our current engine, we do that by decoding a movie via ffmpeg into single pictures and then pass those to a shader. Needless to say, this works, but is pretty complicated and heavy on the performance. I COULD implement this for Unity, too I guess, but a better way without any plugins would be... well... better. :)

Answer 1

Best Answer

Answer by DarkMagicCK · Dec 25, 2012 at 05:15 PM

Hey! Although 1 year later but I've worked out how to change the speed of video playback. Thanks to vogles's nice hack in this post( http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/33181-Movie-seeking )

And the answer is simply change the PITCH of the video's SOUND CLIP when play them all, you need an extra "audio source" to handle the sound clip, and AudioSource.Play() and MovieTexture.Play().

 public MovieTexture myMovieTex;
 public AudioSource myAudioSource;
 
 void Start()
 {
     myAudioSource.clip = myMovieTex.audioClip;
     myAudioSource.pitch = 2.0f; //The scale factor you want
     myMovieTex.Play();
     myAudioSource.Play();
 }

This works fine. Unity seems to sync the video according to its audio clip, you're not able to set the MovieTexture.audioClip.time. If your video clip has no sound, just use any other video app to add a blank sound on it.

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Carkey · Jan 30, 2014 at 09:54 PM 0

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Hi,

I tried this but I'm having a problem, I get a NullReferenceException on the AudioSource. I tried doing myAudioSource = new AudioSource and then doing the myAudioSource.clip = myMovieTex.audioClip; but I still get a NullReferenceException :(

Any ideas why?

hitmax87 Carkey · May 18, 2016 at 03:00 PM 0

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AudioSource audioSource = gameObject.AddComponent();

DarkMagicCK · Jan 31, 2014 at 07:28 AM 1

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I think it is because your video clip do not have an audio track. Make sure your imported video clip has its audio.

splashy · Feb 24, 2014 at 06:43 PM 0

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Happy to report that the code snippet / hack shown above (note: not the plugin) works nicely, I can now control both audio and video frame rates. Pretty much made my day. TheSHEEEP if you're still having probe, I'm more than happy to help if I can can.

Ben-BearFish · Jun 10, 2015 at 06:21 PM 0

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Does anyone know if it is possible to rewind the video with this technique?

Answer 2

Answer by Julien-Lynge · Dec 06, 2011 at 04:40 PM

On the Wiki is a plugin and associated scripts for doing advanced movie playback, and among the features is the ability to set the framerate. You could probably easily modify the script to set the framerate on a per-frame basis to some multiple of Time.deltaTime.

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TheSHEEEP · Dec 07, 2011 at 10:03 AM 0

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Okay, I now get an status error from that plugin. It says "-50". What does that mean? That's not exactly descriptive :D

TheSHEEEP · Dec 07, 2011 at 10:16 AM 0

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Found out that this is a quicktime error. "Error in user parameter list (-50)"

So it is something plugin internal, which makes it even harder to guess what this is about.

TheSHEEEP · Dec 07, 2011 at 10:34 AM 0

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Seems that the plugin needs a full path, as the error is gone when I set the path absolute. Awkward, but okay...

Anyway, it does not display any movie and the plane the script is on stays black. And yes, light is on.

TheSHEEEP · Dec 07, 2011 at 10:57 AM 1

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Well, I found out that the plugin only works when forcing openGL. Unfortunately, this is not really a solution for our application.

I guess I will have to find another solution for this, then.

Speed up video play

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