We are extremely excited to announce the launch of a BRAND NEW offering in the Developer Marketplace: videos! As Roblox continues to grow and the quality of the experiences continues to rise, we, as a platform, are looking for ways to continuously push the boundaries of our tech to support these immersive experiences. With the Bloxys and the One World Together at Home concert serving as proof-of-concepts that videos can change the way that a Roblox experience can be consumed, we are expanding this technology to the rest of our community.
To kick things off, we are releasing 50 videos in the Marketplace for free for all of you to use in your experiences. Most of these videos come from a few of our awesome community video creators, so be sure to check them out!
Where do I find them?
To check them out, head over to the Marketplace in the Toolbox and select Videos from the category dropdown menu. You can also find these via the Library!
How do I use them?
Just like any other asset, from the Studio Marketplace, you can one-click insert or drag and drop them into your 3D Workspace. With a single-click insert, just the Video Frame will be added to your Workspace. It’s important to note that the Video Frame must be placed on a SurfaceGui for it to be displayed. When using drag and drop insert, the SurfaceGui will be automatically added for you. And last but not least, make sure to head over to the Properties panel to enable the Playing setting!
Additionally, at this time, for performance reasons, only up to two videos will be able to be played simultaneously on a client.
What’s coming next?
We are just getting started with this technology. From cutscenes to tutorials to animated textures, we know all of you are going to want to use this in different ways for your own unique experiences. We are working on our next milestone of allowing all of you to upload custom video content for your own experiences, so stay tuned for that!
When will we be able to preview videos online? As a follow-up question, is there a planned release date for when users will be able to upload their own videos.
Well… I woke up today and it was another Monday… how dissapointing
This really makes my day.
Thank you for this feature, this is a very interesting and beneficial and needed feature! There
are sadly so many aspects of development that can be easilly simplified through the use of videos,
but due to the previous lack of video support, many developers like my self have had to struggle
and find creative solutions to get a similar result to what we could get with a video. I’m happy
to say that this will most likley save developers a lot of time and effort.
I also am interested in future jobs related to this. Video support in game opens up a lot of oppertunities
for video editors and video creators. Roblox creators in the past have shown what they are capable of
with a single image, and I am more then excited to see what talented Roblox developers and creators
do with the ability to create and import videos. I am sure this will make gameplay and game experience
much more interesting for players, and I think this will make the video editor/video creator
job a lot more relevant, which hopefully can be good payment for talented creators and artists.
However, I think a video playback or video preview feature needs to be added to the library.
When do you think the ability to upload videos to the platform will be open? Next year?
What kind of video resolutions will be available to use?
ooohhh! So many pros in one update! Thanks Roblox!
This looks like a brilliant feature and I can already imagine the possibilities with having videos in-game. Definitely a feature that many of us have been anticipating but what will the moderation requirements on uploading videos be like?
I think this is something a lot of us would like to know as obviously there may be some gray areas with the moderation process of getting videos approved. Will this be announced when video uploading goes live?
First, the DataStore limit increase; now this?! This is crazy! Roblox keeps on pushing the boundaries again and again! I can not wait until we can publish our own video assets! Thank you for everyone who made this update possible!
Very excited to use this feature, however there are a few questions that I have about it:
First, I’m concerned about loading times. Games take long enough to load as is, since everything is streamed from the cloud in real time. How will videos impact this/how have they impacted this in testing?
What is the max resolution/framerate/length/size video that we’ll be able to be upload?
Lastly, I’m concerned about video quality. I’m sure I’m not the only one who plans on using this for pre-rendered cutscenes, so the question needs to be asked: Will videos always play at the resolution and framerate they were uploaded in? Or will there be some similar system to StreamingEnabled where a super low quality version streams in first, then the higher res version? I personally would never use this for pre-rendered cutscenes if my players will only see a 144p, 20fps choppy video. If I upload 1080p video, I expect it to always play at 1080p except in cases where the screen is not large enough. This is a problem with Roblox’s insistence that everything must be streamed from the cloud in real time, instead of downloading beforehand.
I am guessing VideoFrames will be very under-utilized until they can be uploaded. This seems like a great improvement over having to use ViewportFrames and being bound to the limits of Roblox, and I will be interested to see what people will use them for. Maybe driving/city games will use them for animated billboards like in Time Square?
The limit of 2 is quite low though. Guessing this is the limits of 512MB devices like the iPhone 4S and 5, I and I hope the limit is increased or removed at some point with the sacrifice of potential crashing on lower end devices in exchange for more building options.
Will uploaded videos have maximum sizes, specific file formats, or requirements like them being hosted on youtube? Will this affect the “video thumbnails” on games to no longer rely on youtube?
In all seriousness though, this is super helpful when making story games that involve tv emergency broadcasting. This could actually be super helpful for devs with any sort of tv in their game! This has so many uses!!!
