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This page is up to date for Godot 4.0. If you still find outdated information, please open an issue.

Playing videos

Godot supports video playback with the VideoStreamPlayer node.

Supported playback formats

The only supported format in core is Ogg Theora (not to be confused with Ogg Vorbis audio). It's possible for extensions to bring support for additional formats, but no such extensions exist yet as of July 2022.

H.264 and H.265 cannot be supported in core Godot, as they are both encumbered by software patents. AV1 is royalty-free, but it remains slow to decode on the CPU and hardware decoding support isn't readily available on all GPUs in use yet.

WebM was supported in core in Godot 3.x, but support for it was removed in 4.0 as it was too buggy and difficult to maintain.

Note

You may find videos with an .ogg or .ogx extensions, which are generic extensions for data within an Ogg container.

Renaming these file extensions to .ogv may allow the videos to be imported in Godot. However, not all files with .ogg or .ogx extensions are videos - some of them may only contain audio.

Setting up VideoStreamPlayer

1. Create a VideoStreamPlayer node using the Create New Node dialog.

2. Select the VideoStreamPlayer node in the scene tree dock, go to the inspector and load an .ogv file in the Stream property.

   • If you don't have your video in Ogg Theora format yet, jump to Recommended Theora encoding settings.

3. If you want the video to play as soon as the scene is loaded, check Autoplay in the inspector. If not, leave Autoplay disabled and call play() on the VideoStreamPlayer node in a script to start playback when desired.

Handling resizing and different aspect ratios

By default in Godot 4.0, the VideoStreamPlayer will automatically be resized to match the video's resolution. You can make it follow usual Control sizing by enabling Expand on the VideoStreamPlayer node.

To adjust how the VideoStreamPlayer node resizes depending on window size, adjust the anchors using the Layout menu at the top of the 2D editor viewport. However, this setup may not be powerful enough to handle all use cases, such as playing fullscreen videos without distorting the video (but with empty space on the edges instead). For more control, you can use an AspectRatioContainer node, which is designed to handle this kind of use case:

Add an AspectRatioContainer node. Make sure it is not a child of any other container node. Select the AspectRatioContainer node, then set its Layout at the top of the 2D editor to Full Rect. Set Ratio in the AspectRatioContainer node to match your video's aspect ratio. You can use math formulas in the inspector to help yourself. Remember to make one of the operands a float. Otherwise, the division's result will always be an integer.

This will evaluate to (approximately) 1.777778

Once you've configured the AspectRatioContainer, reparent your VideoStreamPlayer node to be a child of the AspectRatioContainer node. Make sure Expand is enabled on the VideoStreamPlayer. Your video should now scale automatically to fit the whole screen while avoiding distortion.

See also

See Multiple resolutions for more tips on supporting multiple aspect ratios in your project.

Displaying a video on a 3D surface

Using a VideoStreamPlayer node as a child of a SubViewport node, it's possible to display any 2D node on a 3D surface. For example, this can be used to display animated billboards when frame-by-frame animation would require too much memory.

This can be done with the following steps:

1. Create a SubViewport node. Set its size to match your