How Do I 'Reset' my Render Texture When I Stop a Video Player?

Question

I have a Unity VideoPlayer where I use a render texture with an audio source to play the video. VideoPlayer.Stop pauses the video and resets the time to 0. I want to reset the VideoPlayer back to its default after I stop the video player. I searched the Scripting API but I did not see anything obvious on how to do this. How do I do this?

Answer 1

I did a quick test on my machine, a quick solution to that would be to disable the VideoPlayer component by calling myVideoPlayer.enabled = false. This would stop rending the video, and render the rest of the object. If you want to re-use it you can re-enable it the same way.

You can edit the object's material to change what the object looks like when the video is off.

Answer 2

I ended up going on to other projects, but found myself needing a solution to this issue again. It took me a few hours, but I was able to find a solution. I wrote a script to use the render texture I wanted to reset as input.

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

I found the solution here in the Unity forum.

Answer 3

You can also clear out the content of the render texture. Keep a reference of your render texture and when you stop the player you can just

renderTexture.Release();

Answer 4

[ContextMenu(nameof(Clear))]
private void Clear()
{
    if (rt != null)
    {
        var cmd = new CommandBuffer();
        cmd.SetRenderTarget(rt);
        cmd.ClearRenderTarget(true, true, Color.clear);
        Graphics.ExecuteCommandBuffer(cmd);
        cmd.Dispose();
    }
}