Parcel Media Video

Hi all.

Anyone know how videos work with the parcel media texture? I'm setting the default media texture to a url that points to a quicktime movie file (.mov) but it seems to take a very, very long time to load. Having to stare at a black prim for several minutes and then the video finally starts.

Does the viewer first load the whole file into the cache before playing? That would be a problem if the file was very large.

Thanks!

The issue is how long it's taking to load into your computer, and there are a lot of things that affect that. The speed of your internet server, how capable your computer is, conditions on the grid and the specific sim.

How are other people doing? what happens if you try it on another sim, (you have to own the land, or be a member of the group who owns the land and have the media player deeded to it. ) What happens if you try it on another day?

I don't have any other land (group or private) so I'm limited to testing on my single parcel. I'm wondering if the size of the file is what's causing the problem...it's about 15MB. Eventually, I'd like to use much larger video files with my parcel media but not if it's going to have such a long load time.

Anyway to take advantage of streaming technology in this situation or am I stuck directing the parcel media url to a standard video file (in this case *.mov)?

Thanks.

I had the same issue. What version of quicktime and what SL viewer are you using? It got better for me when I upgraded both. But this weekend is not a good time to test anything.

Hi Chicote,

There are two ways of getting video into SL.

Discreet File
You upload a video file (*.mov, or *.mp4) to a file hosting site that allows direct linking, and put the URL into the Video parcel media box in About Land.

This method is the simplest, but has the disadvantage that the file must be downloaded and cached before it can be played. Also, you cannot pause it, because if you do, the resume button just plays it from the beginning. Also, different people on the parcel will see the video at different times, and if you are watching a music video, and have reached the mid-way point, and a friend tps in, and presses Play, they will watch from the beginning, not from the point you are up to.

Streaming Video
With this method you use a streaming video feed, set up with Shoutcast, for example.

This method is a little more complex, and many people have trouble even with the step-by-step procedures.

It is worth persevering with this method though, as with streaming video you can watch straight away, and everyone in the parcel sees the same. If you pause though, when you resume you start to see the film at the point it has reached, not at the point you paused at.

Rock

Assuming this is on a Windows machine, there are settings in the Quicktime Control Panel, the Streaming tab, that affect how quickly the video will start to play (or, inversely, how much it will buffer first before starting). That may help. (The Mac may have something similar. I've no clue what gstreamer does on Linux, even though that's what I use.)

[EDIT: Reread the OP, and I think Rock hit the nail on the head: seems the target is just a file, not being streamed by a host, so the Streaming settings shouldn't help unless it's changed to a stream source. Sorry for the misdirection, but I'm leaving the post here in case somebody else has the other problem.]

Thanks Rock...great info in your post!

Sounds like streaming is the way I need to go if I wanna use videos more than a few minutes long. I confirmed that it was the file size that was giving me grief when I tested a smaller .mov file (less than 1MG). It loaded almost right away compared to the 15MG file I was using before, which took about 10 minutes to load.

I've tried streaming music into SL before, but had problems as you mentioned. I'll give it another try though. Do you have any links to instructions that relate specifically to streaming video into SL?

Thanks again!

Yeah. There are two possibilities here....

1) The feed is coming to you slowly and it's taking a while to get the "cache-ahead" loaded and ready to run on your computer.

OR...

2) The video in question wasn't tagged to "stream" - and it doesn't start to play until the entire video is downloaded. This is something that is set when the video is encoded and there isn't anything you can do if it's not your video other than save it, re-encode it (if possible) and then uploading it to a new location.

The easiest way to test this is to make sure you have the quicktime plugin in your browser and paste the URL directly into your web browser.

If you get a quicktime window fairly quickly but it doesn't start to play for a while and the little grey bar is slow to fill up as the movie downloads - it's a bandwidth issue.

If you don't get a quicktime window but the page is still "loading" and then eventually it finally shows up and starts to play - it's that the video was encoded to not stream, but to be played directly from your hard drive.

Here's a good start:

http://land-answers.wiki.zoho.com/Streaming-Video-in-Second-Life.html

Rock

If your quicktime file is properly formatted for web streaming (NOT live shoutcast style streaming), then you will not need to cache the video before it starts. You have to add 'hints' to the file. It's like an index of the file, with periodic mile markers for quicktime to look at. Quicktime Pro can take any .mov or .mp4 file and add hints. You do this through the export menu - Movie to Hinted Movie.

It sounds to me like this is your problem with your current set up.

I upload many movies to my website to watch with friends at my house, most of them are around 350MB for a full length movie. And they start streaming in 5-10 seconds.

All the other restrictions still apply, although through some fun scripting you can let the newcomers catch up with everyone else. But it's not pretty and takes minutes depending on how far into the movie you are.

Movie nights in SL are FUN! Everyone gets to talk during the movie, and no one complains about the noise and distraction hehe.

P.S. An easy, non scripted way to get everyone in sync? Put on a looped music video and after everyone is situated and has their players going, reset the media URL to your video. Everyone will more or less be in sync watching the real feature of the evening. *wink*

Thanks Riseon. Regarding the movies you upload, are you using a direct link to the file in your parcel media url? For example: http://www.myserver/movies/moviefile.mov. Or are you using a streaming service?

Ultimately, I would simply like to upload a .mov file to my server and paste the direct link to the file into my parcel media url field.

Thanks!