EEI – Issues With Unity Video Playback

To make a long story short, I got videos playing in Unity, mostly.

I say mostly because anytime the videos are playing at anything other than their original speeds they are riddled with audio artifacts. According to this thread, there is no solution to this problem, short of using third party tools. Also according to that thread, specifically a Unity developer who chimed in, speeding up videos without ruining the audio is some sort of Herculean task that no mere mortal could possibly achieve. 

Feel free to test that hypothesis by clicking on the gear icon at the bottom right of either of these two videos and adjusting the playback speed to whatever your heart desires. For some reason, almost certainly not a very good one, Unity is incapable of achieving what is effortless to your browser. Until such time as the 200 IQ supergeniuses at Unity HQ figure this one out, you’re going to be listening to sped up videos with frustratingly broken audio. No one is capable of fixing this without additional third party tools, which is why this problem is (laughably) omnipresent even in the tutorial videos you’ll find online. 

Alternatively, I could manually render each cutscene at various speeds, then upload all these versions of the same cutscene into Unity, then figure out a way to swap between the various versions on the fly, making sure to be accurate down to the right frame. I’m sure if I worked on implementing that Unity would cry and shit its pants in numerous other ways and the entire situation would be a pointless waste of time.

Changing the playback speed for cutscenes is not a huge priority right now, and I’m going to implement a skip ahead feature that, hopefully, actually works and largely accomplishes the same thing. Still, my brain has been broken through years of the 1.5x option, and I doubt that I’m alone in that respect. 

Anyway, I just wanted to write a quick update.