FFmpegOut is a Unity plugin that records and exports rendered frames in Unity to a video file with using FFmpeg as a video encoder.
The main scope of FFmpegOut is to reduce rendering time when using Unity for pre-rendering. It greatly reduces the amount of file I/O compared to exporting raw image sequences, thus it could be an effective solution when the bandwidth is the most significant bottleneck. On the other hand, FFmpegOut is not optimized for real-time capturing. It's not strongly recommended to use it in an interactive application.
- Unity 5.6.0 or later
FFmpegOut only supports desktop platforms (Windows/macOS/Linux).
At the moment, the following video formats are supported within FFmpegOut.
- QuickTime/ProRes 422
- MP4/H.264
- WebM/VP8
Download the latest package from the Releases page and import it to the project. Then, add the CameraCapture component (Add Component -> FFmpegOut -> Camera Capture) to a camera that is going to render frames to be exported.
The CameraCapture component has a few settings.
- The size of frames can be changed with the Set Resolution properties. This is handy for exporting videos in a specific format.
- The frame rate of an exported video is determined from the Frame Rate value rather than the actual application frame rate. The Allow Slow Down switch is useful to keep the frame rate of the exported video stable. It fixes the delta time between frames and stops the application from syncing with real time (wall-clock time). In most cases it makes the application runs slower than real time speed.
Sometimes on macOS and Linux, FFmpegOut throws Win32Exception and fails to
start recording. This is caused because ffmpeg binary doesn't have the
executable permission. To solve the problem, the executable permission should
be given to ffmpeg (e.g. chmod a+x ffmpeg).
- Some codecs don't support arbitrary resolutions and cause errors when capturing the game view in free aspect mode. It's recommended to use the Set Resolution properties in such a case.
- MP4/H.264 is the most preferable option because the FFmpeg H.264 encoder is highly optimized and has a great quality/bandwidth balance compared to other codecs. Use it when there is no specific reason to choose other codecs.
The binary executables of FFmpeg are not included in this repository because they're too large to be included. They have to be added manually after cloning the repository.
Any recent versions of FFmpeg would work, but it's recommended to use KeatsPeeks' static-linked executables because they're used for testing.
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Windows: https://github.com/KeatsPeeks/ffmpeg-static/blob/master/bin/win32/x64/ffmpeg.exe
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macOS: https://github.com/KeatsPeeks/ffmpeg-static/blob/master/bin/darwin/x64/ffmpeg
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Linux: https://github.com/KeatsPeeks/ffmpeg-static/tree/master/bin/linux/x64/ffmpeg
Download these files and copy them into
Assets/StreamingAssets/FFmpegOut/(platform name)/.
Note that FFmpeg itself is not placed under this license. For instance, the FFmpeg binaries included in the release packages are depending on some GPL libraries. This should be taken into account when distributing them within a product. See the FFmpeg License page for futher details.