Parcel Media, Post-"Upgrade"

Getting kind of fed up with SL. It could be so cool. I think LL needs an il Duce to come in and make the trains run on time.

Anyway, been struggling with the new parcel media deal. Watched Torley's video. Now, we are told, we are no longer limited to Quicktime. Cool! So, I guess a list of formats we can use will follow!

Um, wait, nothing in that video about what formats we can use. Hmm, nothing in the knowledge base about it. Searched the forums for "parcel media" and found no thread on it. Went to Help Island, and a Mentor would not answer my question, but instead asked me which I prefer, a fly or a snail. She didn't even tell me what I had to prefer it for. Like, was I supposed to eat the thing, make friends with it, be it, make love to it?

I guess Torley is a Mac user. I mean, Mac users are the only people in the universe who think Quicktime is the only video format, so that is why I say that. To a Mac head there's Quicktime, and then... hmm... duh... all those others. SL is like, "I think u can use, like those other formats, on ur parcel. Try em out, d00d, but YOU SUCK BECAUSE YOU HAVE A PC SO FIGURE IT OUT YOURSELF LUSER! I'M FROM SAN FRANCISCO AND SMOKE DOPE AND EAT SPROUTS WHILE I CODE ON MY MAC LAPTOP BE BETTER THAN YOU, AND I HAVE TO GO TO A PROTEST TO FREE THE LAB RATS IN TWENTY MINUTES."

So, I have to upload one from each format to see if they work, trial and error, takes me a couple of hours just because Torley can't think of any formats that begin with a letter other than Q and is not interested in knowing any others even though he got the job of making the tutorial vid and nine tenths of the users would be embarrassed as hell to be seen behind a Macbook. Why do I have to post a question about this in the forum when Torley produced a video about the subject, for crying out loud? Does the guy who made the video even KNOW what formats are supported? I really, really doubt it. Never mind. Yer doin' a huckuva job, Torley! They should just hire towelie to do the videos. He would probably stay on task better, and his voice would sound less like a cartoon retard than Torley's.

Anyway, I got two MPEGs to work, but some mpegs didn't work, and my other stuff didn't. Never got an avi to work or a wmv. Are they not supported, or do they just not work? Anybody know whether the end user has to have all the codecs installed, or whether the SL viewer has codecs, a la VLC Player? I heard somebody in one thread talking about an app for video playback, but I couldn't tell if was for parcel media or not. Heard of such a thing, anyone? And don't tell me to rtfm. I looked everywhere I could think of.

So, any USERS know what formats are supported in parcel media?

p.s. Wrote this note last night. Tried to post. 404! TYPICAL! Better late than never.

I think you are missing the overall point made... Parcel media now supports http, images etc.. open parcel media tab, click on the type drop down box and look at the various MEDIA you can display on a textured prim.

I heard from the LL backdoor.... Flash is coming to SL.. not the QT supported pre-action scripts version, but an actual Flash player.. so get coding those flv formats, if you like YouCrude quality.

Yeah, I clicked on the drop-down menu. It says "movie" on it. Last time I checked, "movie" is kind of a general descriptor, not a format. It's up to me to figure out what movie formats will work, I guess. I'm not missing the point. If I was missing the point, you could have answered the question. They tell you what format doesn't work. Flash. Does this mean every other format works? Doubt it. So, which ones work? Answer: Nobody knows. Heckuva job, Torley. About Flash, that would make sense, as just about every video clip on the Internet is Flash. It would have made even better sense to do Flash first, and all the other, less universal formats later. Will we be able to embed YT or Google video directly, or have to rip it and upload it to a free server? p.s. SL crashes so incredibly much after the "upgrade" and I lost expensive inventory items, and the build tools are messed up, and I'm about done. These kids act like it's 1995 and we're supposed to be happy with something that crashes ten times a day. Going to check out OpneSim and LiteSim. They sound promising.

A little common sense would have enabled you to answer the question yourself. SL uses QuickTime because it supports the largest variety of file formats across multiple operating systems. It is not a Mac-only technology, even though Apple did write it. So, a quick google on "quicktime supported file formats" gives a large number of hits. The first one is at the Apple site. Go there. On the right side of the web page are a few dozen file formats you can use. http://www.apple.com/quicktime/player/specs.html

Not so hard to find.

Movie.... the format... the 'types' of movie formats supported is dependant on what default Codec's you have in your system. For instance, Quicktime can support avi, but in windows avi is default of media player unless YOU change that. Just becuase you have a codec installed and set to Quicktime as the default programme to use it, doesn't mean others have.

Look at MIMME FILE TYPES in QuickTime preferences to see which ones you have.

It's a safe bet that if you stream at the QuickTime DEFAULT formats, everyone else (for the most part, unless they have changed their default settings), will be able to view them.

I have over 1,000 codec's installed on my system, doesn't mean everyone else has. QuickTime has the largest cross platform viewer/player available on the market and its free. If you know what you are doing, you can use virtually any codec in a movie, as long as the delivery format (wrapper) is QT compatible.

BTW, venting your bowels on the forums, will draw little help. Try being a bit more polite and help will flow.