Following on from my 360 video experimentation in Adobe After Effects I wanted to test out options for embedding my 360 videos within a a mobile app using Flutter.
I found a number of existing packages available for 360 images, however, running 360 video is less common. I found one package called video_player_360 which acts as a plugin for the Google VR SDK for both iOS and Android allowing videos to be played via a remote URL.
I have a couple of reservations about this package. For a start it using a Google plugin which is now archived. Although just for using the 360 video functionality, this should not be a problem. Although, I will be worth me looking at the new SDK which Google has released as a replacement to see if this has sililar video player functionality and maybe I can build a new Flutter plugin using this updated Google VR SDK.
The second issue I have with this plugin is that it only works with remote URLs. This means that a user must be connected to the internet and given the nature of 360 video, these can be quite big files even for a short clip. In my test I was using a 12MB file hosted on Github. My phone was connected to my office WiFi and it took a good 5 seconds to load up. Once it did load, the video worked nicely on my mobile device (Google Pixel 3). I was able to move the phone about and experience the immersive effect of the video.
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