Workaround for playing a movie on a texture?

Because of licencing, I’m considering moving a project of mine from Unity to UE4. There’s one thing keeping me from doing that, though: all my HUD elements are pre-rendered image sequences that are then mapped onto spheres. As far as I can tell, UE4 doesn’t have any way to play a movie on a texture (due to the removal of Bink). Sprite sheets / flipbooks aren’t an option, because some of these sequences have a pretty high resolution (720p).

Is there a workaround for achieving this? Could I, say, put an image sequence in a directory and have the engine cycle the texture 12 times per second? Or would the engine choke trying to constantly bring these images in and out of memory (especially if I’m doing this with 5 or 6 sequences at once)?

Hi ahildebrandt,

Support for movies to textures is on our list of features we are planning. You can look at the UE4 Roadmap and vote for it if you like.

Currently the only workarounds are flip-books (which you mentioned above) and Coherent UI which allows you to have an internet browser as a texture.

RyanB has a unique idea on how to get a higher resolution than 512 out of a Flip-book by breaking up the image.

Coherent UI


Cheers, TJ

We are actually working on the new Media framework right now. As another immediate workaround also check out this community plug-in: [] WindowsTextureMovie - C++ - Epic Developer Community Forums

If it’s on the roadmap, does that mean it’s a feature we should expect relatively soon? As in, would it be safe to start a project that would need this feature eventually, or is there a that we won’t see the feature for half a year (or never at all)? I noticed it says July/August, but I don’t know if that’s an ETA.

Those time frames are our best guess, and is actively writing code for it. I would expect it in 4.4, or 4.5 if there’s a schedule upset. So some time in the next 12 weeks, but more likely around 6 weeks from nowish when 4.4 comes out.

We have had Bink integration with UE4 since December 2013, btw…

Huh? We wrote our own Bink integration for UE4 back in December. It’s drop-in, but you don’t ship it…

UE3 has Bink integration, but we removed it in UE4. You should not have default options for using Bink with UE4. If you do, please let us know so that we can look into what may be causing that.

Thank you,