GearVR video & media formats

Development Platform & Builds XR Development
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1

Hello,

I am using Unreal Engine 4.10.4
I am having trouble getting video to play in Gear VR.
I have successfully gotten movies to play on the PC using Media Framework but when I build the project for GearVR, I don’t see the video.

I put the movie in a movie folder inside Content.
I make a movie texture and material.
I change the movie material to unlit and input movie texture sample into Emissive.
I make sure to start playing the movie by using Play Media on Event Begin Play in the level blueprint.

Thank you

2

Everything you did seems correct to me. (as a reference, I’ll put here the link to the documentation, describing the steps you already did correctly: Media Framework in Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.1 Documentation )

In order to play the video, consider that Gear VR is an Android device, and it has the same specifics and limitations of an Android device: you can find the Android’s supported media formats here:

Notice that there are situations where a media that can be played in Windows won’t work in Android, and vice-versa.

3

If you want to analyze video file you should try this program it is very helpful:

4

There are a lot of things that need to be taken care of when playing video on Android.

Regarding this topic, even the official UE4 documents are not well documented (dunno, probably because they’re still working on it).

For example, I got mine working by following step 10 from this post here: Black Video Texture

This was never mentioned in any official UE4 documents, leaving me locked out for hours, trying to find solution.

5

Hi, I got movies to work without changing editing the Detail Mobile part of my material.
What sunk me was a combination of File Format and Aspect Ratio. So far, I’ve ONLY gotten 16:9 H264 encoded MP4 to play.
I took a 360 video and my camera made a 1920x1080 video. Didn’t work. Converted to 1920x960 and boom, it worked.