Problem with MoviePlayer, MediaPlayer in Linux

My team and I have been trying to port our game to Linux. Things are working fine, but we’ve hit a roadblock with playing start-up and in-game videos. We couldn’t find any class which could be used for handling MP4 video playback in Linux (like AppleMoviePlayer for Mac, and AndroidMoviePlayer for Android). We tried encoding the video with different codecs as well.

After an intense debugging session, among other things we also came to understand that the WindowsMoviePlayer.uplugin which is used for video playback in Windows does not get initialized when playing the build on Linux.

Is there something that we are missing?

The player plug-ins for both the StartupMovie and the Media Framework are platform-specific. As their names suggest, the Windows plug-ins only work on Windows - they rely on Windows Media Foundation as the underlying mechanism to decode and play videos. In particular, we do not have any player plug-ins for Linux at this time. This means that video playback on Linux is simply not supported right now - neither for startup movies, nor for in-game videos.

We started to investigate the creation of cross-platform player plug-ins, i.e. using the VLC library and/or Google’s VP8/VP9 decoders, but it’s not a high priority right now, and it may still take a few more weeks before we have something usable.

You can track the progress of media support on Linux in the related forum post.

This was our suspicion as well. Thanks for the quick reply. We’ll be following the forum post that you provided.