Welcome to the Firepit

You are invited to attend the Firepit party at the Velvet Waters Social Club.

This is a PG, rather than U video. Nothing that would make most even raise an eyebrow, but just be aware that you can see a bit of flesh or 2 (had fun editing to minimise those ).

Without further ado:

Original Version - Slightly Smaller. Doesn't play on machines without the proper codecs

Welcome to the Firepit, at the Velvet Waters Social Club (Quicktime, 55 Megs, will play on QT6 and higher. Please use Save As... as my host doesn't have the transfer speed to stream)

If the video appears blank when you try to play it, head over to http://www.3ivx.com/download/ and select to download the Windows or MAC OS CODEC. It's a mere 1MB download.

New version - Slightly bigger but should now play on all machines

This version doesn't have MPEG Quantization checked.

Welcome to the Firepit, at the Velvet Waters Social Club (Quicktime, 60 Megs)

I'd be happy to hear your opinion or constructive criticism on the clip. It was constrained by what footage I happened to catch during the party, but I did the best I could with it and so would love to hear what you think.

Wendel

PS: If you know a solid machinima server from which we could stream this (or a lower quality version) into SL, I'd be interested to know!

If you are using 3ivx for the codec, you can make it fully compatible with QuickTime 6 and 7 and viewers won't need any other software installed to see the video. To me it looks like you probably had MPEG Quantization checked in the advanced options. That's something that will make it not play on eveyone's computer. Here are two tutorials for 3ivx - one for single pass and one for dual pass. These will make video that plays great on website, iPod and in Second Life:
http://freevlog.org/index.php/2005/10/23/compress-for-the-web-with-3ivx/
http://freevlog.org/index.php/2006/04/26/443/

As for "streaming"...
Your server is working fine and what we're working with here isn't technically steaming but progressive download. They're different technologies but similar from the viewers standpoint. The problem that you're probably seeing is that when you follow a link directly to a QuickTime movie using Internet Explorer 6, it downloads the entire video before playing it back. If you use Firefox on a PC or any browser on a Mac, what you'll see is the movie start to play as it downloads.

All that being said, if you are looking for a great, free place to serve up videos, my recommendation is Blip.tv . They're free, reliable, and have lots of cool features for blogging and sharing the video. I even have a tutorial for them though it's a little out of date as they changed their site slightly: http://freevlog.org/index.php/2006/05/08/tutorial-how-to-cross-post-in-bliptv/

Thanks for that. I did indeed check that option on my last render as the help suggested it improved the quality at the cost of size. Didn't realise it would also make it non compatible without the codecs. I might rerender it without that option now...



True. What I meant is that, while I am not limited on bandwidth usage as such, my server is very slow to serve files (rarely goes above 30kbps). So it's quite painful to simply try and watch the video within the browser. I recommend downloading it and watching it at your convenience locally.



Sounds great. Thanks.

Wendel

Hey Wendel,

That was really great. Wish I could do something like that!!

Glad you enjoyed it. It was fun, if time consuming, to make.

If you are a Windows XP user, you can certainly experiment with movie making using FRAPS (www.fraps.com) and the free Windows Movie Maker 2 software that comes with XP. But be careful, if you find you enjoy it, you might end up spending a lot of time tweaking videos.

Wendel