VLC for Unity now supported on Linux

Posted by martz 8 hours ago

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Comments

Comment by tmtvl 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by thih9 4 hours ago

Context about the Unity terms change controversy: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/unity-is-killing-its-...

> Initially, the Runtime Fee sought to charge developers a per install tariff once projects had passed certain milestones. It was a decision that left many users reeling, resulting in a colossal backlash (…)

How users reacted: https://old.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/16h9lnw/whats...

> Any install, any reinstall, any installation on a second device, each and every one slap the dev with a fee. It gets dumber, because that cracked copy of your game on the high seas still incurs a fee when the pirate installs it. You might think we're at peak stupidity. You might think anyone who makes anything with Unity is a "fucking idiot" (the CEO certainly does), but we're not done yet. It's retroactive. (…)

Comment by arijun 2 hours ago

Side note--is there any way to access reddit now for people who refuse to log in or get the app? Old reddit asks tells me I have to use new reddit for "security" and new reddit says "Get the app to keep using Reddit".

Comment by nolok 16 minutes ago

On mobile ? Not really. Their website is mobile cancer, and their app is barely better. I'm impressed at how bad it is, and it's not even about "pushing more ads" but "controlling what people see". That's also why they've removed r/all.

Comment by netniuq 43 minutes ago

There is Redlib[0], an open source alternative Reddit frontend, with many public instances[1], e.g. https://redlib.catsarch.com/

There is also LibRedirect[2] (or PrivacyRedirect, although I for one have no experience with that), a browser extension that automatically redirects reddit.com URLs to your Redlib instance of choice (it also does the same for other platforms, configurable).

[0] https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib

[1] https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib-instances/blob/main/ins...

[2] https://libredirect.manerakai.com/

Comment by rob-lag 1 hour ago

I just used UBlock Origin to block the "Get the app..." message.

Comment by tweetle_beetle 1 hour ago

On Android https://github.com/QuantumBadger/RedReader - no account required

Comment by benoau 3 hours ago

Sounds similar to Apple's "Core Technology Fee", literally a mechanism for sabotaging third party app distribution in the EU.

Comment by Elfener 2 hours ago

This is a very big oversight in that EU law.

Allowing third-party "app stores" is completely useless when all apps must be approved by the operating system company.

It's also being abused by google (technically, will be, very soon), I guess they saw that since the legal framework for this kind of thing has now been written, they can do it too.

Comment by lukeschlather 2 minutes ago

There was no oversight. The EU told Apple the CTC did not comply with the law. Apple's new scheme still seems bad but I don't think this is the end of it.

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_...

Comment by gumby271 2 hours ago

Except at least there are alternatives to Unity without replacing your entire OS and hardware.

Comment by martz 5 hours ago

yes this is good too, actually started contributing to this :)

Comment by martz 8 hours ago

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.

Comment by torginus 1 hour ago

Would it not be more efficient to create the decoder in-process, then you could feed it the bitstream via a compute buffer, and the video would be rendered to a texture.

Comment by sylware 6 hours ago

Don't forget to build 'correct' ELF64 binaries for broad elf(glibc)/linux distro support (-static-libgcc -static-libstdc++, and tight glibc ABI version control with binutils VERSION scripts).

At least those build options should be default.

Comment by martz 5 hours ago

thanks for your comment, will look into it!

Comment by SurajMishra 6 hours ago

Thank you very much.

Comment by Hendrikto 4 hours ago

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

Comment by tokai 3 hours ago

Unity (the DE) was discontinued 9 years ago..

Comment by extraduder_ire 1 minute ago

It's still being developed outside of Canonical. The latest release of an Ubuntu version is 26.04.

https://unityd.org/

Comment by fusslo 5 hours ago

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

For cutscene playback?

Comment by harrisoned 5 hours ago

For a sandbox game this is very useful, where you can spawn video players in-game. For social games (like VRChat) this is also great since synced video playback is a very popular feature for people to watch content together in VR.

Comment by csande17 5 hours ago

Unity includes its own video player implementation ( https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/Video.html ), so presumably you'd mainly want to use VLC for wider range of supported codecs?

Comment by kjjohnsen 4 hours ago

Basically. Unity video player is fine if you control the content. The other very reasonable option is to funnel shared content through a synced web browser interface. I've developed a few collaborative XR applications, and have used a blend of things to support sharing.

Comment by ComputerGuru 2 hours ago

It’s not hard to use libavcodec to transcode, though.

Comment by martz 5 hours ago

RTSP support, twitch-style in-game visio, any kind of non-game Unity apps (there are many), 360 video playback, mediaplayer in VR headset, simulators of all kinds, etc..

Comment by hparadiz 1 hour ago

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.

Comment by torginus 1 hour ago

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.

Comment by happyPersonR 2 hours ago

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 ?

Comment by ekjhgkejhgk 6 hours ago

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

Comment by nisiddharth 5 hours ago

I've 3rd party cookies blocked and it works just fine. Have you disabled all cookies?!

Comment by xena 4 hours ago

Why do you do this to yourself?

Comment by TiredOfLife 1 hour ago

Yeah, why use software that works instead of software that doesn't