VLC for Unity now supported on Linux

martz

Recently added support for Linux to VLC for Unity, with full hardware decoding. It uses OpenGL rendering through GLX and EGL, with DMA-BUF texture sharing to pass video frames efficiently to Unity’s renderer. Only x86_64 is supported at this time. In the future, I will add ARM64 support as well as Vulkan.

ekjhgkejhgk

Blocked because I don't use cookies. Ok, I've always preferred mpv anyway.

fusslo

Can a unity dev/game dev help elucidate why you'd use vlc in unity? For cutscene playback?

tmtvl

On a similar note: Godot VLC (< https://github.com/xiSage/godot-vlc >), because let's not pretend we don't remember the Unity terms change controversy.

Hendrikto

To everybody else being confused: This is about Unity the game engine, not Unity the desktop environment.

happyPersonR

Sidenote: Video game programming with unity was an absolute nightmare to try and get working with any kind of gitops and or with multiple people working on the same code base a couple of years ago Wonder if that changed ?

hparadiz

VRChat folks will love this. Videoplayers are embedded into Unity scenes aka "maps" as a regular imported lib. The videoplayer is a drawn surface where users can see video playback. Most commonly used for streaming live music from a stream like Twitch.

torginus

Forgive me for my ignorance - but my understanding is that VLC is a frontend for ffmpeg, and even ffmpeg is 'just' a wrapper for hardware video decoders such as NVDEC when viewing supported codecs, like h264/5.

jokoon

I don't know why, but on windows, the first time I start VLC after a windows boot, it takes about 5s to 8s to open a video file, any sort of video file I suspect it's a graphics driver issue, or something else

maxlin

I wish Unity's built-in videoplayer wasn't such a disappointment. The performance on Windows is god awful. Have had to write a mass video reference recompressor/in-scene replacer that just attempts to pick the best compression flags and reduces resolution just avoid dropping frames playing ~1080p videos on multi-core PC's with discrete GPU's. Mac was fine playing even the overly high res original footage, high 2000+ pixel portrait tutorial videos. Wrote a proper double-buffering video/audio player in Unity using parts of an ffmpeg wrapper over ten years ago. Seems silly they never did anything similar officially, just used lackluster platform API's.

bananaboy

Just in case you only read the headline and were confused, this is libVLC which underpins the VLC player.