Media Texture Performance in VR

Is there any way to get HD and better yet, UHD resolution video to play back in VR smoothly? I get juddering performance issues when HD video is played back in VR. I’m using 360 panos, so I’m mapping the video to a sphere. Ideally, I’d like to use UHD stereoPano video with the screenPosition node to play back nice stereoPanos in UE4. But I can’t even get a normal HD video to play back in VR without juddering.

Not yet. We are working on this, but progress is a bit slow due to GDC preparations. I’m not sure if it will make it into 4.12. Might not be ready until 4.13.

Update: Please try the latest code in the Github Master branch and see if that improves things. There have been a number of performance improvements. In particular, on Windows I eliminated one buffer copy, and the pixel conversion happens on the GPU now,

Great! When is the ETA for 4.12 and 4.13? HD video seems to be a major feature for VR, since watching a movie in HD is one of the most important use cases for VR right now.

We haven’t announced release dates for 4.12 yet, but my guess is that it could be end of March (shortly after 4.11, which has taken much longer than expected and is scheduled for this month as well). No idea on 4.13.

As usual, the release dates can change, depending on whether or not the builds pass QA testing.

We understand the importance of HD and 4k video, but it is still a relatively small user base, so it hasn’t bubbled up to the top of the priority list just yet. We’re having internal discussions about it though.

This is a critical feature for us. In the meantime, we are looking into licensing Bink Video. There are a number of projects that we would like to incorporate Stereo360 Video in the Background. Kite and Lightning had need of this in the Insurgent vr project. With more and more cameras that shoot 360 video like the ThetaS and Gear360, this is going to be important.

This is really important for us too. Currently stuck at 720p unfortunately

Hey following up on this 1.

Any updates on if this will be making it’s way into 4.12? Doing a big event with a Vive thats launching end of July and filming the background footage in 6k at the moment but getting a destroyed framerate doing even 1080p video right now.

Considering doing a web page with a video on it and pulling that in through Blui or something instead.

It missed the 4.12 branch date last week. There is still a lot more work to be done, but I’m working on it almost full-time. It will be in 4.13 now (scheduled for July(, and in the Master branch much sooner than that.

Thank you for the update! This is great to hear!!! This will be a huge deal for VR folks!

Glad to see the MediaFramework is getting attention! Also making a movie player for VR however the official documentation describes it as experimental and not for production. Currently only doing a proof of concept but It will be hard to convince my customer, to allow “an experimental feature” to be used in production for its million customers. Is there an ETA on finalizing the MediaFramework altogether?

Will these 4.13 improvements make it possible to hit 60 FPS while playing a video in GearVR?
I need to play videos for a game and failure to hit 60 FPS will instantly fail a Gear VR Oculus Store submission.

Is there a bug for this issue? How can we know when the fix has been committed?

Has anyone had to test 4K 60P video material - media texture mode from 4.13 preview??

Has anyone had a chance to test 4K 60P video materials - media texture mode from 4.13 preview??

4.13 (preview) 360 video is possible…and quite good…(4k @30fps , at least)

Would Still love to be able to invert the media texture (due to mapping it to the inside of a sphere, using 2 sided texture)

  • without to much of a performance hit…but things are looking really promising…

can you advice on how to project video on bacground? I’m new in the issue.

I am also trying to play a 360 Video on a sphere. At first I had some juddering and my FPS were below 7 or so.
So my workaround now is to cut the sphere into 12 pieces and set them all into one Blueprint actor. With this i get now about 30 FPS.
I have inverted my media texture just by applying a textureCoordinate and set the U tiling to -1.

One question I still have: what is the max resolution the Media Player can work with?
I have tried to find something in the internet but wasn’t succsessful at all :confused: