first a disclaimer: I don’t really know what I am doing
With the 4.2 release today the option was added to wait for the startup movies before jumping into the level.
So i decided to try it out.
After adding a small random mp4/h264 video in the Project Settings and checking the “Wait for Movies to complete” checkbox i started the game preview in “standalone game” mode, which launched its own process and played the startup video followed by the level. Just as i wanted it. Awesome.
So i packaged it, because why not…started the standalone packaged windows version and the startup video played…however the screen stayed white. No video there, just a white screen and the videos audio was to hear. After that the level loaded.
Another thing I noticed when closing the game while the video was playing was that the process did not close. It stayed open and I was still able to hear the audio from the video. Even after the video should have been finished the process did not close. It instead was still listed in the taskmanager, whre it moved to backgroundprocesses and there it was just sitting and slowly filling up the RAM.
This applies to both the packaged version and the standalone preview in the editor.
I have been looking into your video issue for a bit and was wondering if you could possibly send the video to me that is causing the screen to go white instead of playing the movie. This would ensure that I could set up the perfect test case and help with the issue.
All I could find was the Information that the Video has to be a h264/mp4 file and no information about the optimal bitrate, resolution, fps…audio and the like.
So I used your “UE4_Animated_Logo.avi” from your Press-FTP-Server and converted that with the Adobe Media Encoder into a h264/mp4 video.
Here are a few of the files I tried it with (hosted via google drive).
They are all based on your “UE4_Animated_Logo.avi” and where converted using the Media Encoder Presets which are refered to in the filenames of the videos.
All 720p Versions and the 480p Version worked as described in my Post above.
The 1080p Versions do not work at all (just a black screen for a Moment, even in the editor), but i uploaded them anyway, just in case.
Thanks for pointing me in that direction.
After installing Handbrake and playing around with the settings there I was unable to get it to work. Even with the Anamorphic setting to “strict”.
The result was the same as before.
My problem is a almost like that, but I can’t play the h264 mp4 at all.
In standalone a blank panel appears for a second and goes off to the level (I have checked the option to wait for the video to complete).
In editor, launching on another process the movie is ignored.
yeah Unreal Engine 4 dont seem to have good video support. But I do hope they will add more support for it so you could for instance play cinematic videos or videos on say a screen.
And I didn’t get mine to work either with handbrake.
I tested it with multiple BP only projects, some of which were just the standard templates with the video and the video settings added via the project settings.
All of that with the engine installed through the launcher and not the github version.
No code was harmed performing these tests.
In 4.2, any Content-Only game is going to be broken for movie playback as the Slate content is not being copied to the game currently. I have spoken to a couple of devs and they have been working on the movie issue and hope to have it resolved in future builds. I am unsure as to what build or date of the build but it is a known issue that is being fixed.
Hope this clears up any confusion. Have a great day!
