How Do I Reset a Render Texture to Black when I stop a video from playing?

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When I first play my applications my render textures appear as black. When I play a video and pause it the video stops playing and pauses as expected. When I do VideoPlayer.Stop() the video stops but the video player still shows where the video stopped.

I would like the video player to show either black or preferably another color to show there is a video screen. The render texture material is Sprites/Default as suggested from this video that I used to create my video players. The steps used to use render textures for videos is about halfway through the video.

I don't know where to go from here. There has been very little I have been able to find on using and scripting for render textures for videos in Unity.

Answer 1

Answer by tillmonkthered · Jul 31, 2018 at 03:46 PM

I was having a similar problem. I found that if you can get a reference to the RenderTexture, you can call its Release() method, and this seems to do the required reset.

https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/RenderTexture.Release.html

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pamelacook · Jun 19, 2019 at 08:25 PM 1

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It's been a while since I took a look at this. I tried Release() as below where I selected the render texture I wanted to reset. I also tried DiscardContents(). Neither of them cleared out the render texture.

 public void ClearOutRenderTexture(RenderTexture renderTexture)
     {
         renderTexture.Release();
     }

BlinksTale · May 20 at 07:19 AM 0

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I was seeing a flicker in editor of the old contents every time I restarted a video - this is a perfect solution to that. Thank you!

Answer 2

Answer by pamelacook · Jun 19, 2019 at 10:42 PM

It took me a while but I was able to find a solution in the Unity forum. I decided to make the background transparent.

 public void ClearOutRenderTexture(RenderTexture renderTexture)
     {
         RenderTexture rt = RenderTexture.active;
         RenderTexture.active = renderTexture;
         GL.Clear(true, true, Color.clear);
         RenderTexture.active = rt;
     }

Here's the link where I found the solution.

Clear Renter Texture Link

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Answer 3

Answer by Fenikkel · Jan 28, 2021 at 09:19 AM

Release it works for me:

 m_VideoPlayer.targetTexture.Release();

But in the documentation says that use it only "when you are finished using them"

So maybe make it transparent it's the best solution:

 RenderTexture rt = RenderTexture.active;
 RenderTexture.active = m_VideoPlayer.targetTexture;
 GL.Clear(true, true, Color.clear);
 RenderTexture.active = rt;

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Answer 4

The answers that suggest to reset the texture to black using GL.Clear are perfectly valid. But sometimes it can be sufficient to just set the clip to a black video, so here's the alternative:

make a black, 1 or 2 seconds black video
Which can be created with ffmpeg
ffmpeg -loop 1 -i black.png -c:v libx264 -t 2 -pix_fmt yuv420p blackvideo.mp4
Put blackvideo.mp4 in a Resources folder

Create a 'Clear' extension method for VideoPlayer

using UnityEngine; using UnityEngine.Video;

public static class ExtensionMethods {

   private static VideoClip _blackVideoClip;
     private static VideoClip blackVideoClip { 
         get {
             if(_blackVideoClip == null)
             {
                 _blackVideoClip = Resources.Load<VideoClip>("blackvideo");
             }
             return _blackVideoClip;
         }
     }
 
     public static void Clear(this VideoPlayer _vp)
     {
         _vp.clip = blackVideoClip;
     }
 
 }

Use the extension method
```
   myVideoPlayer.Clear();
```

How Do I Reset a Render Texture to Black when I stop a video from playing?

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