Should LL allow Windows Media and Real Player file formats in-world?

i think they should, imho, becasue if thye did that would open a whole world of better market for them, and make it easier on us, becasue its hard as HELL to convert a WMV to MOV format

No because Windows Media is not fully supported on all operating systems and Windows Media is a crappy format!

yea, but what about REAL format, Real format is like a mix of the 2, les laggy as windows media yet a little more distorted then quicktime

Wasn't "Realplayer" one of Philip Linden's previous creations?

Broccoli

no clue

@ Kiboe : Also no because it's not an alternative. As you said it's more distorted than Quicktime.

I prefer DivX myself.

Personally I think Quicktime sucks. Slow, grainy, stuttery. Reminds me of a 2400baud modem *smirks*

~Jessy

That's because most mov's you see are not encoded in H264. If all content was already in H264 ( a quicktime format) all content would look crisp.

Ayup.

But as "most" are NOT in this format, why not use a player that works with what "most" look crisp with?

*looks at the blank stares from LL when faced with that logic*

~Jessy

Someone said the viewer will actually play a variety of formats, including wmv, already - that it depends on what codecs you have installed on the client workstation. I've never tested this, and I think the reason quicktime was chosen is that it is the most widely supported, cross platform wise.

And yes Coco, Philip is the guy who invented the Real media streaming technology. He was Real's CTO for a number of years before starting up Linden Research.

zk

So LL was founded by THE person who invented a media player and they're using another?

*snort*

I'm not even going to make a comment on that.

~Jessy

No, and for that very reason: the fact that these formats still exist makes everything more complicated to code and support. In a relatively new application like SL, there'd be no excuse for perpetuating them.

quicktime is a piggy player, the mov files are huge for their quality, and it cost a substantial pile of money to get the broadcaster if you want to VJ

ive complained about it for a while now ...

but WMV and REAL are in the same boat, large questionable compression formats and not supported by all OS's that SL uses

i still think the awnser is mpeg

unless nullsoft gets off their asses and makes a winamp for linux and mac then nsv is the way to go

Why not good open standards like OGG and Matroska?

now here is the thing, they have another format that IS supported in-world, and that is WinAmp and winamp plays pretty much everything if you set it up right

Escuse me, but Broccoli said that, not me.

If you are trying to imply that I am Broccoli, believe me, nothing could be farther from the case. We are simply friends.

coco

P.S. My alts don't post, as a rule. My alts are Cocoanut Cookie (that bitch!) and Strawbearry Shortbread. Lots of good treats, but no broccoli.

Sorry Coco - I have no idea why I confused the two of you, brain fart. (was just going by memory of the previous post, and hadn't checked back to see who it was)

WinAMP isn't a format, it's a media player program. It just happens to be able to play the same sorts of media streams the SL viewer can (plus quite a few, given the right plugins).

That one is Quicktime the one with most crisp! Depends on how content was encoded. H264 or not.

Quicktime H264 is mpeg4. That's why Quicktime is the best for use for support of video. Quicktime plays alot of formats like mpeg.

I can't answer this poll because I think:

RealPlayer: Yes.
WMP: No.

The solution MUST be cross-platform, and considering Phil's former role at RealNetworks, it's frankly amazing that RealPlayer isn't integrated already.

Window Media Player would just lock too many people out.

I would prefer that LL focus their efforts on fixing the plethora of existing problems and bugs before spending any time duplicating functionality with competing file formats.

- Ace

agreed

my thing isnt that quicktime does or doesnt play X format, its the fact i have to have 1 extra thing installed and running on my computer before i can do something in SL

which is dumb, we dont need winamp or whatever to use music streams, why do i need something to play videos?

if they had gone with their original ideas of using open source when they barfed up video you wouldnt have to worry about cross platform access cause it would have been taken care of by the client just like audio

As others have said, Quicktime is good if you encode it as H.26 and it is cross platform, so that is good. What I would like to see is Flash integration, which I realize isn't on your poll, but still, Flash in SL would be wonderful.

I don't care about Real (which has always seemed to be of dubious quality), and Windows Media is too proprietary for a large number of people to be able to utilize properly.