Movie playback bug in 4.11: standalone vs. new editor window

Development Asset Creation
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1

We’ve been running into a serious issue with movie playback (game-breaking in our case) after integrating 4.11. This issue did not occur in UE 4.10.

We’ve repro’d it in a sample project and also put repro steps up in a DropBox folder at http://bit.ly/1UJ3R39

Instructions:

  1. Extract MovieTest. to a base folder (it will create a folder named “MovieTest”)

  2. Double-click the uproject to open up the project in 4.11

  3. Note that if you click Play with either “Selected Viewport (PIE)” or “New Editor Window (PIE)” then you will see the movie playing

  4. Try the same again but with “Standalone Game” selected

  5. Note that there is no movie playing

2

HI Mothership.Entertainment,

This is a known issue and is in our system as UE-28011. Unfortunately I do not have a timeframe of when this will be addressed.

3

OK, let us know … this is actually pretty severely game-breaking for us since we have a video playing in the background of our front-end screens, and we can’t really send builds out to publishers until we get a fix or a workaround for this.

4

Spent some time looking into what had changed in the engine but no luck.

I can tell that videos still work for you guys in Paragon – how are you doing these?

Also, is there a video playback example in the ContentExamples? I looked through a bunch of the maps but couldn’t find anything for video playback specifically.

We’re really not doing anything more complicated than WMV → Media Player → Media Texture → Material → set this mat as the Brush on an Image widget (which is set to fullscreen) inside our main menu widget.

5

Have you tried other video formats to see if this alleviates the error you are seeing?

Unfortunately at present the Media Framework is production ready, and we cannot recommend using it for active development. We appreciate your patience while we work to resolve the issues with the system.

6

Hi – I did try using an MP4 file instead of a WMV specifically for that reason, but that didn’t work at all – not even in the Media Player object previewer in the editor. What format would you recommend I try besides WMV and MP4?

7

Have you tried a .avi or mpeg4 file? Try one of these to see if you get better results.

8

Like I said, I tried an MP4, but it didn’t work at all. It just says “Not Ready” in the Media Player preview window no matter what I do, and fails to show anything but a black screen in the game no matter what.

I also tried an AVI using the Intel IYUV codec to allow me to render it at 1080p in Premiere, but I got identical results to the WMV format. So, I don’t think it’s related to the underlying video file format at all.

9

I was notified this conversation has been moved elsewhere. I will mark this one as answered for tracking purposes and move the conversation to the UDN.

10

Modify the end of FEngineLoop::LoadStartupCoreModules() to look like this:

#if WITH_ENGINE
	// Load runtime client modules (which are also needed at cook-time)
	if( !IsRunningDedicatedServer() )
	{
		FModuleManager::Get().LoadModule(TEXT("GameLiveStreaming"));
		FModuleManager::Get().LoadModule(TEXT("MediaAssets"));
	}
#endif

I’ll try to get this into next week’s 4.11 hotfix.

11

Thanks – I tried adding this, but the behavior seems the same; no video playing in our game.

12

Did you compile the code with the correct build configuration for your game test? I tried it with your content-only test project from the Editor as Standalone PIE, and it worked.

Note that, in Standalone PIE it will actually use the Editor binaries with the -game command line switch. If you launch the game on its own, you need to rebuild the game binaries as well.

13

Max, thanks – we can verify that it IS actually fixed now. Sorry for saying it wasn’t at first; I had another engineer verify that this is indeed fixed. Looking forward to seeing this in the hotfix next week!