MCCinema

Paper plugin to play back video (and audio) in-game without the use of clientside mods.

Features

• Play local MP4/MKV/AVI/WEBM/MOV files or download videos directly from YouTube (optional)
• Experimental full RGB mode, which works without any dithering leading to a superior image quality compared to similar plugins.
• Play Livestreams directly from Twitch or YouTube by simply using an URL instead (no audio).
• Automatic resource pack generation and hosting for synchronized audio playback for videos.
• True 1080p or even 4K playback with efficient tile-based rendering
  • Only limit is the server and player bandwidth.
• Improved bandwidth usage. Down to 8 MB/s for a really large (2176x896) screen.
• Significantly improved visual quality
  • Floyd-Steinberg, Stucki or Atkinson dithering with temporal noise reduction
• Full playback controls: pause, resume, seek, and skip
  • Audio is sliced into seamless chunks to work around Minecraft's audio limitations
• Various compression techniques are used to reduce bandwidth usage as much as possible by only updating whats actually needed
  • Selective updating, downsampling, dirty region detection and more

Basic usage

All commands have helpful tab-completion available

1. Use /mcc create <screen id> <aspect ratio> [x] [y] while looking at the lower left corner to create a screen
   • Tip: Make sure your screen is evenly lit, e.g. using light blocks.
2. Place your video .mp4 files in /plugins/MCCinema/videos/
3. Use /mcc play <screen id> <video> to start playback. Optionally include the --audio <chunk size> parameter to play with audio.
   • For audio, this plugin will use mcpacks.dev for Resourcepack hosting by default.
   • Alternatively, it can automatically host a resourcepack server if audio is enabled. On some hosts this may fail.
   • To allow for resuming and pausing of playback, audio data is split into chunks of <chunk size> seconds in length. The default value of 10s is usually good.
   • Use the --experimental flag to enable full RGB mode.
4. You can use /mcc quality <screen> <performance/balanced/quality> to change playback quality settings. This will have a significant effect on bandwidth and CPU usage.
5. Use /mcc crop <screen> while a local video is playing to adjust its viewport. Scroll to zoom, use W/A/S/D to pan, and hold sneak for precise adjustments. The saved crop is reused whenever that video is played again.

To download videos from YouTube, run /mcc download. There is some first-time setup required for this. MCC uses yt-dlp for this. You will be asked to confirm the yt-dlp download. But of course you can also always download YouTube videos manually and place them in /videos/ yourself!

A note on bandwidth usage:

This plugin will inevitably create a lot of traffic. Minecraft isn't really a great video player.

This is optimized as best as possible (and likely better than many similar plugins), however it can still be a lot.

The actual amount of traffic scales with two factors: Screen size, and how dynamic the video is. Videos with very little movement such as slideshows will barely generate any traffic. You can see live metrics, including bandwidth usage, using /mcc debug <screen id>. However note that those metrics are before compression. You can press F3+3 to get the built-in bandwidth graph, which will give you after compression bandwidth.

One example on a reasonably sized (7x4 blocks, 896x512) screen:

• Server Trailer: Average 3 MB/s
  • This screen size gives you good enough resolution for most content

Two examples on a very large (17x7 blocks, 2176x896) screen:

Using Velocity with compression-threshold: 256 and compression-level: 4

• Bad Apple: Average 400 KB/s
  • Only two colors, pillarboxing on both sides, many large same-color areas -> lower bandwidth usage
• Bite Marks: Average 8 MB/s
  • Many colors, full CS format, very quick scenes -> high bandwidth usage

Configuration

You can find a full, commented configuration file here

Additional notes:

• This plugin makes heavy use of multi-threading and benefits from more and faster CPU cores significantly.
• Video and audio are streamed, so RAM usage should not be a meaningful concern. However, this plugin will create considerable GC pressure.
• It is recommended to use a Velocity proxy in front of your server, and to then disable network-compression-threshold in server.properties. Doing so will offload the work of compressing and encrypting packets to the proxy, which can significantly improve performance and throughput. If that is not possible, increasing netty-threads in spigot.yml might be worth considering. If using Velocity, try playing around with the network-compression-threshold and compression-level settings a bit. I had great results with 256 and 4 respectively.
• Packets are bundled per frame, so packets-per-second should not be a concern here.
• You can tweak most config settings during video playback with /mcc debug <screen> <setting> <value>. Depending on the video content, tweaking settings might have a big effect (e.g. anime style vs real life videos).

Showcase

Very large screen (17x7 blocks, 2176x896 CS) playing at 24FPS

Even larger screen sizes are supported, but you will run into bandwidth limitations