Forum Discussion
Viewing 3D 360 Videos, which codec to use?
Hi Guys,
I am very interested in making stereoscopic panorama videos and watching them via the Rift. I've already tried it using Unity, but i certainly wasn't happy with the achieved result. In my mind the gap between a viewable Framerate and a reasonable video quality is way to big. Is there a particular video codec i should use or is using unity actually a bad idea?
If not, what are the other options? I would really like it if there was a solution that actually worked with both pc and mobile
Thank you very much for your help,
Justus
I am very interested in making stereoscopic panorama videos and watching them via the Rift. I've already tried it using Unity, but i certainly wasn't happy with the achieved result. In my mind the gap between a viewable Framerate and a reasonable video quality is way to big. Is there a particular video codec i should use or is using unity actually a bad idea?
If not, what are the other options? I would really like it if there was a solution that actually worked with both pc and mobile
Thank you very much for your help,
Justus
3 Replies
- Unfortuantly with the current version of Unity you will not be able to achieve video resolution over 1080p if your lucky, 720p is more consistent, this is because of a couple of factors, 1) unity does video decoding on the CPU not the GPU and the unity supported codec .ogv isn't the best. 2) you quickly run out of memory when playing video any longer then just a few seconds. You can look into 3rd party plugins but your mobile support will be limited and you will still be far from achieving 4k playback. Untiy uses the Theora ogv codec which they decode on the CPU. when you import a video into your unity project unity automatically converts your video to the ogv format. Unless you use a third party plug in any video codec you encode your video will will be re-encoded to ogv once you import your video into your project file.
I've been in talks with Unity and they've told me that in Unity 5.1 they have optimized the .ogv codec and it will be able to play a single 4k stream or up to 3 1080p streams, its still being decoded on the CPU though. You can look into the Bink codec system, they have a sdk integration for unity but you need to special request if from Bink, and even then its only on the PC and they've informed me that they are currently reworking the package and isn't quite ready yet. - Thanks! That's unfortunate, are there any other options? Is there another software to solve this issue? Or is there a working programming approach?
- You can bypass unity and render 360 stereo from 3ds max, maya, blender. Then use a player to read your file to view in the rift.
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