Unreal Engine 4 Media Framework plug-in using the Video LAN Codec (libvlc).
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.
This plug-in was last built against Unreal Engine 4.19 and tested against the following platforms:
- Linux (Ubuntu 16.04)
Mac- 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.
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:
- macOS: vlc-4.0.0-20180319-0303-dev
- Win32: vlc-4.0.0-20180319-0303-dev-win32
- Win64: vlc-4.0.0-20180319-1331-dev-win64
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.
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 (ue4plugins#17).
To clean up, clone, make and install VLC (including libvlc) into your project, run the VlcMedia/Build/Vlc4LinuxCloneMakeInstall.sh script from within your project's root folder. If you later need to make and re-install VLC from the existing VLC code, run the Vlc4LinuxMakeInstall.sh script instead.
All required libraries and plug-ins are included in the ThirdParty directory and work out of the box.
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!
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.