Tower unite needs a new media player plug in> heres your solution

This current plugin works but it sucks, straight up. Youtube is boring and anoying, i assume its all streamed through a virtual machine with a chromium browser with adblock on it :laughing: And for that the theater sucks to get acheivments and is always empty because theres so much on youtube you can tolerate. I would like to use a website like flixtor.id for free movies and shows. It would be so much better to actually put the hours into the theater and the theater would actually play movies like… a theater :exploding_head: I would always play swamp cinema on garrys mod just to watch videos on that server instead of a browser cuz i would earn points for their server, so it would be cool to do the same with my new favorite game.

SUGGESTIONS FROM OTHER GAMES(for developer independent research):
VR CHAT- LSMedia world with their own plugin they made which accepts every link that has a window in it playing a mp3. Image>

GMOD- Swamp Servers theater using their chromium codec browser, they use youtube and a specific free movies and show website and i would play my own with their mp4 link player. Link with instalation instructions and github containing their plugin> https://swamp.sv/video/plugin-guide.html

PS: A cool idea with this new plug in would have a community suggested list of movies to play on schedule but that could be a legal liability for pixel tails dibble dabble in pirate movie sites

Our media player uses Chromium similar to what GMod does. We just use the Unreal Chromium Embedded Framework. Unfortunately this means not every codec is supported, and we have to pay a costly fee to support the better codecs. We have attempted to piggyback off of Steam’s embedded web browser which gives us those codecs, but it has issues with YouTube. I hope to return to this issue and resolve it.

We definitely can’t do anything like the LSMedia world in VRChat as that is highly illegal.

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To input as well, VRC and Gmod doesn’t inherently support this kind of stuff, their implemented media players initially only allow weblinks, these ‘libraries’ are made by the community and make it a grey area. This stuff tends to use the M3U8 format which to put it simply is a txt file that tells a webpage where to pull short bits of information from. Streaming services use this same format as it’s a cheaper way to not put too much strain on the client’s bandwidth and putting the heavy lifting on the host instead.
All of these libraries are neatly tucked away websites or servers, some impossible to find, some easy to find with some web searching. All of which host the media. A third party loophole if you will.

I’m sure maybe down the line, M3U8 could be a possibility if there was a work around to get further codecs to work, without footing a costly fee every month/year.

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What version of unreal engine? i can attempt to make a rough plugin of what im thinking. Becasue i dont think you have to implement a specific website to use so you dont have to get involved with the pirate movies and stuff but instead a system like the current one that grabs a link and detects a embeded mp4 file and plays it so we can use youtube or any site that has a media file embedded and plays it regardless of what site it is.

There exists an alternative source for media which til this point has not been discussed

Media players support .webm playback, but even this has its own limitations:-

  • File length is currently hard capped at no longer than 3 hours

  • You need a host that can provide the adequate downstream bandwidth for the file

Relying on third party cloud storage accounts for this is generally not recommended as not only do they impose fairly restrictive bandwidth limits, they also obfuscate direct URLs to your source file.

To counter this, one might consider running a HTTP server from their own machine. — Providing you know how to port forward to allow incoming packets to access port 80, and are willing to trust strangers with your public-facing IP address.

XAMPP is actually a pretty decent and simple HTTP self-hosting suite, with installation only being a few clicks. Drop your .webm files in the htdocs folder and enable the HTTP service.

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