I’ve been in Beta Testing for a new game I’m about to release on the Google Play Store (the game is called Endless Elevator). I kept having Native Crashes on specific Android platforms in all my builds in the Pre-Launch Reports. Native Crashes can be terrible to work through if you get unlucky so I was a bit worried and figured I’d just have to leave it like it was and release with errors! But being a bit stubborn I threw a few days into sorting through it and am very glad I did. Working through the problem highlighted some things I didn’t know about Android Video support and was an interesting exercise in troubleshooting. So here is the method I followed and the resolution to the problem.
In each case it was always the armeabi-v7a package that was causing the issues. (I split my build into two APK’s for arm64 and armeabi to make it a smaller installation size – I haven’t gone the android bundle path yet).
The Pre-Launch tests are run on a variety of Android platforms but usually they will include these four below in some form or other and my build kept crashing with a Native Error on each of them.
When I looked at each of them in turn and played the video of the interactive session the fail point always seemed to be about the time when I had a full screen projected video playing or about to play. The video is used as an introduction and tutorial to the game so it was pretty important for me to get it working.
I downloaded all the Logcat’s from the console above and looked for any errors or crash reports.
In each case I found this line (which was a bit of a dead giveaway):
——— beginning of crash
A half dozen lines above the likely culprit was writ large:
07-23 04:00:47.862: W/MediaAnalyticsItem(9345): Unable to record: (codec:0:-1:-11:0:3:android.media.mediacodec.mime=audio/ac3:android.media.mediacodec.mode=audio:android.media.mediacodec.encoder=0:) [forcenew=0]
07-23 04:00:47.890: W/Unity(9345): AndroidVideoMedia: Could not create decoder for mime type audio/ac3.
07-23 04:00:47.890: W/Unity(9345): (Filename: Line: 2177)
07-23 04:00:47.906: I/Robo(9288): No foreign elements detected, falling back to original ScreenState.
07-23 04:00:47.910: I/Robo-HyperMultiGraph(9288): New Screen: Optional.of(ScreenNode {Id=5, PackageName=com.ZuluOneZero.EndlessElevator, ActivityName=Optional.of(com.unity3d.player.UnityPlayerActivity)})
07-23 04:00:47.913: E/Unity(9345): Could not allocate memory: System out of memory!
07-23 04:00:47.913: E/Unity(9345): Trying to allocate: 4294705156B with 16 alignment. MemoryLabel: Audio
07-23 04:00:47.913: E/Unity(9345): Allocation happened at: Line:70 in
07-23 04:00:47.913: E/Unity(9345): Memory overview
A bit of googling about led me to believe that as per the error message above the audio codec used in the video was a problem. The AC3 codec is an Audio format that’s used in my MP4 Video. I’d never given it much thought but this format is not supported across all the Android platforms (one of the problems of Android development is that there is so many different platforms out there).
The Video Editing Software that I normally use is called OpenShotVideo. It’s fantastically good for the price (free) and is easy to use and powerful enough for my meagre needs. Turns out the default audio codec used is AC3 (there is probably a way to modify this with OpenShotVideo but I wasn’t in the mood to troubleshoot someone else’s software). I really hadn’t given the audio codec part of the MP4 a second thought.
While I was doing all this work and after I worked out that the audio codec in the Video was the problem I had a look at the video settings in Unity. I found that there was already a built in transcoder that I’d never noticed right there in the Unity Video Asset Import screen.
That’s pretty cool! Unity has already solved all my problems before I even knew I had them. So I hit the Transcode tick box and waited for twenty minutes while it went to work transcoding. That wait time should have been a bit of a warning. I did the build and uploaded the new apks to the Google Developer Console but while doing that I found that my build size had jumped almost 17 MB!
This was my size before the transcoding:
And afterwards:
A quick look at the Editor.Log confirmed that the transcoding process had made my lovely low quality 7 MB Movie over 20 MB:
Used Assets and files from the Resources folder, sorted by uncompressed size:
22.1 mb 6.8% Assets/Art/IntroMovePlusFoyerClippedSlowLow.mp4
To fix this I downloaded the HandBrake Open Source Video Transcoder and transcoded my original video asset using the AAC Codec for Audio.
After importing this into my project and rebuilding again I was left with a similar package size and no Native Crashes. Hooray. I’m going to release this Beta Build to Production soon so getting over this little hurdle feels like a huge V for Victory. Huzzah.