Long videos as background

[JJ840]

Hi! I'm new to this, and I was wondering how feasible to use very long videos (On the order of 1-3 hours) as a background. Could I run this without chewing up a ton of ram or processing power or even at all? Thanks!

[raw maw]

That would take forever to install and upload. Why not just loop it?

[JJ840]

I'm hoping to record basically an entire day/night cycle on cyberpunk once it comes out. I think it would be really cool to just use it as a background. Also, would I have to upload it or could I just use it straight from my computer?

[Biohazard]

You don't have to upload it, you can drag and drop it into the wallpaper browse window to use it right away without making a project.

Generally this is no issue as videos are streamed from disk, but an SSD would definitely be preferable for a huge video like this.

[Tim]

That should not cause any issues, you should probably compress that video with h.264 and just test how it works. If the file is very large, you may want to use the 64 Bit version of Wallpaper Engine.

You can change the behavior of how the video is loaded with the "Video loading" option in the "General" tab in the settings. "In-memory" will load the full video into RAM once and "from disk" will stream the video from your hard drive.

[JJ840]

Gotcha! Thanks for the quick response, I'll mess around a bit and see if I can get a test run going. Thanks, and have a good day!

[JJ840]

Oh great, I'll go try that now. Thanks!

[sweatshopking]

Originally posted by Tim:

That should not cause any issues, you should probably compress that video with h.264 and just test how it works. If the file is very large, you may want to use the 64 Bit version of Wallpaper Engine.

You can change the behavior of how the video is loaded with the "Video loading" option in the "General" tab in the settings. "In-memory" will load the full video into RAM once and "from disk" will stream the video from your hard drive.

i've got a few local videos i've been trying to use, my system is fairly capable, high end current ryzen, 3080, 32GB ram, usage is low, but the videos only play the first 10-15 minutes and then they start at the beginning. I can't figure out how to make the entire video work as a wallpaper. they work fine in everything else, but not wallpaper engine. I can't figure out why. i've tried re-encoding them in different formats, but it's always the same. any ideas? happens to any video more than 20 minutes.

[Tim]

There is no time limit or anything else, you say they work "in everything else", did you specifically test Windows Media Player because that's the closest to what you can compare Wallpaper Engine to (don't skip ahead or anything like that though, this might change the outcome of your test). Generally just make sure your video is a common resolution and a standard framerate (30 FPS / 60 FPS) using h.264 encoding in an .mp4 file.

It's certainly not a hardware limitation, more likely it's a codec or driver issue that can be fixed some way. You can try and follow the instructions from this page from top to bottom and the issue will probably go away:

https://help.wallpaperengine.io/en/noshow/notplaying.html

LAV with DirectShow is sort of a last resort, that usually tends to fix "unfixable" problems like that reliably.