Unreal 5.1 crashes when trying to play a video (on Macbook Pro - Ventura)

Good evening. I am developing a small video game on Unreal Engine 5. I have made a switch from Windows to Mac. The problem I am having is that now on Mac UE5 (version 5.1) crashes when I try to play a video (specifically, when a widget window containing the video should open, so before I even press play). This didn’t happen on Windows; everything ran smoothly.
The error I get when UE5 crashes is this:

It seems to be about something with the aac audio decoder on the mac. But I don’t know how to fix it. Should I change the video format? The video is in MP4 format, and since the audio is not important to the purpose of the game, I also tried inserting the video with the audio removed. But nothing has changed, Unreal keeps crashing.

Can anyone help me out?

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Bumping this – having the exact same issue in our project.

Any luck finding a solution to this issue? I’m having the same problem.

I hear several features like nanites etc don’t work with Mac. Not sure if it’s as simple as changing a project setting. I never use Mac, so sorry I can’t be specific.

Having the exact same issue here. Wasn’t a problem in 5.0.3, and even 5.0.3 projects that are converted to 5.1 after being built. Anyone find any solutions?

ok…

I think I actually solved it. When importing a .wav file from my original project into a new project I was prompted with an import failure and an error message which stated that unreal was unable to import 24bit audio files.

I re-output all my audio files to .wav files with 16bit audio channels. That didn’t work. Then I remembered my h264 .mp4 files that were being referenced had audio attached. Audio that wasn’t being used. I re-output my video files so that they had no audio channel at all and bam that worked for me.

I believe that the solution is both making sure that your video files have no audio channels and also making sure your .wav files are 16bit and not 24bit.

My windows 5.1 unreal project has been zipped, sent to mac, opened and all video widgets using electra media player are working as intended.

I really hope that works for everyone on this thread as well.

Good luck!!

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