Media Player Looping Issue

Having trouble with media player’s looping on Mac:

  1. The media player editor works much better in 4.10.

  2. If I turn off looping in editor and then run the game and let the video play to end of clip, next time I run the game, the video won’t play anymore, it stays frozen on first frame. Have to restart editor before it plays again.

  3. If I stop the game before the video reaches end of clip, then next time I run the game it will play fine from beginning.

  4. If looping is set to true in media editor. then the video will play fine each time I run the game.

  5. Setting looping to true in Blueprints doesn’t have any effect, doesn’t seem to be working at all.

  6. Have tried a variety of file formats, all of them exhibit the same behavior so its not an mpeg4 playback issue.

Thanks for your time and help! I hope this issue can be resolved quickly, I have high hopes for the media player inside UE4!

-Jason W.

Hello JasonW,

Would you mind providing me with some screenshots of your blueprint logic for the media player playback?

Could you also provide me with your Mac specifications?

Thank you,

Hi Andrew,

My machine specs are:

iMac 27-inch Late 2013
3.5 Ghz Intel Core i7
NVIDA GeForce GTX 780M 4096 MB

I did some editing to my blueprint and found out that I can set looping to true and it will loop properly even if the looping is off in the media player.

But if you turn off looping and let the video play to the end, it will play the audio but not the video the next time you run the game… The same thing happens if you let the video play to the end in the media player without looping on, the video won’t play when you start the game but the audio will. The same is true even in the media player by itself.

In version 4.9 the looping behavior was different. I couldn’t get looping to work at all… sometimes the video would get stuck while the audio played back fine, but if I let the video play to the end of the clip it would unfreeze the next time I started the game. In 4.9 the media player was broken so had to do everything in code.

This issue seems to be beyond anything wrong with my code, but you might have useful suggestions for me.

Thanks,

Jason W.

Hey JasonW,

So I am actually having some trouble getting the Media Player to playback my video within 4.10 in a new blank project on the Mac I am testing. I am going to continue to investigate this issue, but in regards to assisting you controlling your own playback in with your Media Player, I created a simple tutorial on our Wiki which you might find helpful. I am using overlap events and created a blueprint containing a media player reference variable. This works pretty well, and is simple enough to be modified to have a bit more functionality.

Media Player Asset Tutorial

Let me know if this was helpful at all. I am going to continue my investigation with this issue and will report back with my findings.

Thank you,

Hi Andrew,

Thanks for the great tutorial that you posted. I tried replacing the Play and Pause nodes with just the Set Rate nodes set to 1 for starting the clip and another one set to 0 to pause the clip like in your tutorial, but I got the same result as before with the Play Pause nodes.

When looping is enabled the video will play fine every time I run the game, but if looping is disabled, it will only run once and requires me to shut down the editor and then open the project again before it will play the video again.

Again its only the video that behaves like this, the audio plays evertime regardless of wether looping is enabled or disabled.

I’m sure its just a bug somewhere in the code… It could have something to do with the rewind node that I’m using to set the clip back to the beginning. I could try replacing that node with a node that will play from a specified time.

I’ll report back my results!

Thanks for looking into this for me!

Cheers

Jason Wilhelm

Hi Andrew,

Did some more testing, here’s the results:

  1. When I disable looping but pause the video before it reaches the end. The video will play back correctly the next time the game is run again. This seems to be consistent, I tried it over and over. So it seems the issues is related to the video reaching the last frame, (Which for some strange reason turns black, which might indicate it went past the last frame) Then the video will not play again until the editor is restarted.

  2. Used a Seek node instead of rewind to reset the play position back to the beginning when the game is finished, I also tried some later times too, like 5 seconds in. The video is frozen on any frame set by the Seek time node, when the game is run again, but fails to play the video.

  3. I tried a Close node to close the media player when the game finishes, but the editor crashes if you try to play the video again next time you run the game.

Hope these observations help!

Thanks,

Jason W.

Hey JasonW,

I really appreciate you going into detail to test this issue further. There is a bug report in place (UE-20209) for calling the Media Player to play and pause which causes the media player to stop working.

The issue is still being investigated and worked on and we appreciate your patience while it is resolved. Once a fix is in place, it will be integrated into an upcoming release. You can use the bug number I have provided to search the release notes to locate the fix in the release notes when it is fixed and integrated.

If you have other questions please let me know.

Thank you,

I really appreciate the chance to participate in making Unreal Engine better!

Thanks for all your help Andrew. :slight_smile:

I ran out of time and haven’t been able to fix this for 4.13. It is scheduled for 4.14 now. In the meantime, as a workaround, insert short Delay nodes between multiple media player commands to give the player’s state machine some time to process commands.