VlcMedia
Unreal Engine 4 Media Framework plug-in using the Video LAN Codec (libvlc).
About
This plug-in is still under development and likely has a lot of remaining issues to be fixed. Use in production is not yet recommended.
Make sure to pull the Tag that matches your Unreal Engine version. If you sync to Master the code may not compile, because it may depend on Engine changes that are not yet available in the UE4 Master branch.
Supported Platforms
This plug-in was last built against Unreal Engine 4.18 and tested against the following platforms:
LinuxMac- Windows
IMPORTANT: Please note that this repository contains pre-compiled binaries for libvlc and its plug-ins, which are licensed under LGPL. This means that you cannot create monolithic builds of your game without violating LGPL, the UE4 EULA or both. The libvlc libraries must remain dynamic libraries that are bound at run-time - static linking is not allowed - and the licensing related files in /ThirdParty/vlc must be retained.
This also means that this plug-in cannot work on platforms that do not support dynamically linked libraries (i.e. iOS, HTML5) or do not currently implement support for it (i.e. Android, XboxOne).
Epic is in the process of adding plug-in support to monolithic builds, but there is no ETA yet. Once this is supported, you will be able to distribute monolithic game and server builds with VlcMedia, provided that the libvlc libraries and plug-ins remain as separate DLLs.
Prerequisites
A relatively recent version of libvlc is required. The latest stable release (currently 2.2.1) is not sufficient.
For Mac and Windows, the following nightly builds are currently included:
- Mac: vlc-3.0.0-20170914-0450-git.dmg
- Win32: vlc-3.0.0-20170914-0251-git-win32.zip
- Win64: vlc-3.0.0-20170914-0457-git-win64.zip
Nightly builds can be downloaded from the VideoLAN web site (see below).
For debugging on Win32 and Win64, you can download debug builds and replace the corresponding files and folders in the VlcMedia/ThirdParty/vlc/ directory.
Linux
A suitable version of libvlc must be installed or compiled from source. If you ship your game on Linux, you will likely want to include libvlc with it, so that users don't have to install it themselves. We will eventually include those binaries in this repository, although it is not clear what distros should be supported and where the builds are coming from. A better workflow needs to be established for this.
Once the VLC libraries are installed on your machine, you need to add their path to your LD_LIBRARY_PATH](ue4plugins#17) environment variable. Copying the libraries and VLC plug-in's into VlcMedia's /ThirdPart/vlc/Linux directory is currently not supported out of the box as the Build.cs file expects these files to be under the correct sub-directory for the target architecture.
Mac, Windows
All required libraries and plug-ins are included in the ThirdParty directory and work out of the box.
Dependencies
This plug-in requires Visual Studio and either a C++ code project or the full Unreal Engine 4 source code from GitHub. If you are new to programming in UE4, please see the official Programming Guide!
Usage
You can use this plug-in as a project plug-in, or an Engine plug-in.
If you use it as a project plug-in, clone this repository into your project's /Plugins directory and compile your game in Visual Studio. A C++ code project is required for this to work.
If you use it as an Engine plug-in, clone this repository into the /Engine/Plugins/Media directory and compile your game. Full Unreal Engine 4 source code from GitHub is required for this.
Support
Please file an issue, submit a pull request or email us at info@headcrash.industries