Here’s an interesting effect I found, when trying to display a noise screen with Media Player. Instead of using a video source, I thought it might be less resource intensive using some simple small noise images and play as looping Image Media Source. Here I use 12 noise images like this, made with gimp (could use less).
It basically works, but I found, that the noise contrast in the playback starts fine at beginning and immediately drops within the first second. I could drill down this by changing my images having a black bar moving from left to right.
When running this sequence, you can see, that the last few bars are still visible like a “tail of a comet”, which explains, that the noise texture contrast drops, because the overlay of 3 and more images statistically cancels out black and white into gray (this one is using 12fps)
It is interesting, that playing the same image sequence in the Editor Media Player does show each single image without that smearing effect. I could not find any options that would affect the behaviour at playback of image sequences, but to me, it looks like this is some magic feature within UE4 to make image sequence playback more smooth.
Actually, it’s not a real problem, but I would like to understand, what’s going on and maybe I missed something regarding the image media source.
BTW: I just tried to check source on Github but could not find any hints in ImgMedia code - but that’s such a huge amount of code and for sure I missed the right places to look at 