Supported media formats

Pixotope uses the Unreal Engine media framework for file-based video input.

Recommended file based video format for playback

Bink and HAP are video codecs that perform decompression using a computer's graphics hardware, substantially reducing the CPU usage necessary to play video. They have become the standard for high-performance, high-resolution movie playback on media servers, for live video performance and event visuals. They include support for alpha channels.

Bink

Pixotope recommend the playback of video files encoded using the Bink codec.

Learn more about how to Set up video playback using Bink

For more details check the Unreal Engine documentation: → https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.3/en-US/bink-video-for-unreal-engine/

HAP

Pixotope supports the playback of video files encoded using the HAP codec.

There are four different flavors of HAP:

• HAP has the lowest data rate and reasonable image quality

• HAP Alpha has the same image quality as HAP and supports an alpha channel

• HAP Q has improved image quality, at the expense of larger file sizes

• HAP Q Alpha has improved image quality and an alpha channel, at the expense of larger file sizes

For more details about encoding check the HAP documentation: → https://hap.video/using-hap

For more details on setup and playback check the Unreal Engine documentation: → https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.3/en-US/media-framework-technical-reference-for-unreal-engine/#hapcodecplaybacksupport

Encode HAP video using FFmpeg

For HAP movies use the following command:

ffmpeg -i yourSourceFile.mov -c:v hap outputName.mov

For HAP Alpha movies use the following command:

ffmpeg -i yourSourceFile.mov -c:v hap -format hap_alpha outputName.mov

For HAP Q movies use the following command:

ffmpeg -i yourSourceFile.mov -c:v hap -format hap_q outputName.mov

Encoding a set of images to HAP using FFmpeg

Export to HAP directly from a .tif sequence with alpha using FFmpeg:

ffmpeg -r 30 -f image2 -s 1920x1080 -i test%02d.tif -vcodec hap -format hap_alpha -pix_fmt rgba test.mov

• -i is where you set the pattern for the image sequence naming (where "%02d" means that zeros will be padded until the length of the string is 2, i.e. 01…20…30… and so on. If no padding is needed, use pic%d.png or %d.png or similar)

• -r is the frame rate (fps)

• -s is the resolution

• and the output filename is "test.mov"