Videos play on emulator but fails to play on HoloLens

Student

Hi,
I have an application running on the emulator which plays a couple of videos. But when I deploy the app on HoloLens the app doesn't play those videos on HoloLens.

Please let me know why this is happening.

Dwight_Goins_EE_MVP

Hi @Student

Could you provide a few more details please?
This question is very generic without any real specifics such as how you built the application, if there are any errors, how do you show the videos - media element with Xaml, WebRTC with embedded web browser, or something else. Is this a 2D Xaml app versus 3D holographic app etc.

I'm going to make some assumptions, and you can just correct me where I'm wrong.
How did you create this application, using Unity or C#/C++ with SharpDX or DirectX? If you didn't use Unity, can you turn on DirectX Debugging, there's probably an error being generated that tells you a little more information, maybe a shader error or etc. The Emulator doesn't have stereo rendering, so most rendering built against typical render targets work just fine. It's when you move into a stereo holographic render target that alot of frameworks don't have support for and need to be updated to either draw it twice on left and right eyes, or use the newly engineered render target array that was created in Shader 5.0 and above logic within DirectX 11.0

lyx_zhl

@Dwight_Goins_EE_MVP said:
Hi @Student

Could you provide a few more details please?
This question is very generic without any real specifics such as how you built the application, if there are any errors, how do you show the videos - media element with Xaml, WebRTC with embedded web browser, or something else. Is this a 2D Xaml app versus 3D holographic app etc.

I'm going to make some assumptions, and you can just correct me where I'm wrong.
How did you create this application, using Unity or C#/C++ with SharpDX or DirectX? If you didn't use Unity, can you turn on DirectX Debugging, there's probably an error being generated that tells you a little more information, maybe a shader error or etc. The Emulator doesn't have stereo rendering, so most rendering built against typical render targets work just fine. It's when you move into a stereo holographic render target that alot of frameworks don't have support for and need to be updated to either draw it twice on left and right eyes, or use the newly engineered render target array that was created in Shader 5.0 and above logic within DirectX 11.0

I Tried to use Unity using Handheld.PlayFullScreenMovie to play mp4 video, but it doesn't work. could you tell about how to play video in Unity for Hololens?

james_ashley

@lyx_zhl,

Under UWP Build Type, you can use either D3D or Xaml. You should try Xaml and see if that makes a difference (underneath the hood, this code is implemented using the mediaelement class in UWP, so it may still need the Xaml project type to work properly) .

rubytinker

Did you get this working using Xaml? I was trying to use a sample movie texture to play a video in Unity3D using D3D, and it worked fine when I played it in Unity, but once I deployed it to the Hololens it basically showed an empty app (there wasn't even a screen to play the movie).

holofearless

my case is different. I need to build app in D3D and need play video. MovieTexture work poorly in term of frame rate. Is there another way to play video when build D3D?

papiot

@holofearless Did you get this thing to work? I'm having the same issue - Just trying to get a Movie Texture to play inside hololens and I am having difficulty in doing so. Difficulty being not working )

holofearless

I did by reducing the resolution of video to 360 instead of 640

codeholo

See my full tutorial on playing videos on the Hololens using the 2017 MR toolkit and Unity editions https://codeholo.com/2018/01/14/playing-videos-on-the-hololens-apps/