Streaming movies and quicktime.

All right, I tinkered with the movie system for over seven hours yesterday. I installed the free version of quicktime, recompressed a few videos using the Divx avi codec, and tested playback in quicktime and SL.

My review?

Do not bother using Divx. Period.

Quicktime's use of the Divx rendering engine is buggy at best, with major visual artifacts and sound cut-offs happening at random, regardless of video quality or bandwidth. Mind you, they play allright from your harddrive, but streaming them fails 2/3 times.

My advice: If you want to stream with quicktime in SL. You MUST buy the $29 upgrade to create true QuickTime movies. By importing an AVI and then exporting (not saving) it to Quicktime format with the proper bandwidth settings, you can get a good balance of filesize vs. quality.

In addition, the video playback does not seem to have the audio cutout problems that Divx did.

Keep in mind, you can use straight MPG, but the filesizes for even a small clip are so high as to make streaming it impossible...


Anyway, quicktime and movies DO work, but you will have to get the 'proper tools' first.

Sorry,

Thx for the information, Im actually experimenting with diffirent format I'll consider your recommandations.

I'm seeing once again that a kewl new feature is added, but some of us are urged to shut it off to prevent lock-ups and crashes, some are using it just fine without any hours of hassle using whatever pre-existing set-up, and others are spending hours of their RL time trying to jigger the dials to get the thing to work, even suggesting additional cost outlay.

I'm grateful for Foolish's detailed description of the time he spent and the equipment.

My question is this: how are people going to get this paid?

I have a large parcel of land in a mature sim with pretty good FPS that forms a natural amphitheater. An enterprising projectionist could put in a screen, some seating (temp or perm), and if they had the right set-up on their own personal computer, I guess, they could stream in whatever movies they could find for free -- I can't imagine them paying for licensing.

Why? Because I don't get how any of us are going to make money off this venture, even to do something like cover the $29 upgrade of Quicktime or whever, let alone the tier on the land.

Dwell/traffic might be intense, but let's say we even somehow miraculously got up into the 10000 dwell category and even got into the developers' awards, it's just not going to pay the bills. I've never really seen any open, honest study of high-end dwell and whether it truly pays bills. Older players say it is a suckers' game. It's actually a suckers' game I still bother with as a newer player because every $1 counts and traffic/dwell has also value for sales as well, but honestly, I don't see how the movie-making business can prosper from traffic alone.

You could try to charge admission, but the admission tools that used to be on land were borked and buggy, and now I think they've been removed entirely.

So that leaves the group admission price. You form a group, and anyone who joins it, let's say "Movie Buffs Group" pays $20 to join. But that $20 then circulates to the entire Movie Buffs list equally (that's how that forced-distribution system i nthe groups work). Each new Movie Buff that comes into the group is paying a ticket price that distributes to all the other Movie Buffs and the money can't get to the land owner or the projectionist who paid for the films and equipment.

So that leaves, what, voluntary ticket taking, and then trying to boot all the loafers? It's hard to serial process IM'd request stacking up like that, especially when you get the usual TP requests for an event.

Hmmm...how is this going to work? Probably somebody smarter than me in the movie business already has figured this out. But anyone who wants to try some kind of thing like this on my land should contact me.

I'd just like to add that I upgraded QuickTime (many months ago) and think it is an amazing bargain. You get a program which can quickly and painlessly save files in many different formats without hassle (it just works). There really is nothing else like it.

After using it for months I'd gladly play twice that for the software -- especially if I were creating streaming content for an online game.

~Ulrika~

In my professional opinion, it's foolhardy to even consider using a codec not supported by the default installation of Quicktime. Better to just stick with what Quicktime Pro can generate 'out of the box'. Otherwise, you're gonna be making videos only you and a very, very small percentage of others will even be able to see. Forcing people to download a codec just to watch your video isn't going to go over well. People are just too lazy.

I suggest using either Quicktime's MPEG-4 codec or the Sorenson 3 codec included with Quicktime Pro.

For what it's worth, Quicktime 6's current MPEG-4 compression isn't all that great. It's not bad at higher bitrates, but at lower settings it doesn't hold a candle to Divx. When Quicktime 7 is released soon, it will include a *much* improved MPEG-4 format known as H.264 which should give up to 2 times compression improvment over the current stuff. Of course, like i said, the problem will be getting everyone in SL up download the new player.

I just dont see streaming video as a 'group' activity. It takes all the fun out of watching something 'together' if we are all watching different parts of the same film. And if someone drops their video stream in the middle of the movie they have to start from the beginning. What good is that? Not only do you have to sit thru the movie all over again but your friends are already ahead of you. Unless you got real streaming going on (not just a mov file sitting on a server), it will never be worth it. And if you were doing true streaming, whats that going to cost you in terms of real $? The best implementation I see is for product/services ADs. Or simple creative short films.

I almost started a new thread on this - but hoping someone here has some answers for me

Keep in mind - I'm an absolute n00b in regards to streaming - but technical enough to be able to figure stuff out.

From what I understand, there are two ways to host media playable by quicktime:

1. Fileserv
2. Streaming

Now, my question:

Lets say I had an downstream pipe of 768k (Which yes, I understand, is *completely* insufficient).

Now lets say I wanted to host a movie to the maximum number of AV's possible given my connection (even if that ended up being only 1 or 2).

In that regard, is there any difference between Fileserv and Streaming - with how much *concurrent* bandwidth is being used? Would I have better luck streaming a file over my 768, "fileserv"ing my file..... or would it flat out make no difference either way?

Also... what format is best for compression? MOV or MP4? I've got 25 minute cartoons compressed down to 18MB... does that sound right? or should I be getting better compression than that?

Your advice is appreciated!