New Landlord...How do I setup multiple streams on parcel?

Hey everyone,

I bought a parcel of land and built a condo with eight apartments. I'm just texturing them now and adding furniture (fully furnished). I want to include a big screen and stereo with every unit, but I don't know how to have 9 separate streams on the one parcel. Eight for the apartments plus one for a party patio outside by the pool.

Can someone give me a simple breakdown of how to accomplish this feat or direct me to a blog or other information that describes it please?

I'm a noob when it comes to setting up media at all, so please be gentle.

Also, if anyone knows where I can find an entertainment system that is copy, that would be very much appreciated. I've looked in-world and on xstreet and can find speakers and big screens that are copy, but not the tuner that controls the media. None are copy that I've found.

I have a hard time believing that someone with an apartment building with 20 units buys each streaming device separate. That would cost a fortune. I'm sure I'm missing something here. Unfortunately, I know nothing about scripting so I don't know how to set something like that up myself. If there is any information on doing so, that would also be of value to me.

Thank you everyone for your time. Have a fantastic day! )

If it were me I'd just put in the free tv and the SL television streams. It's all free.

As for how to get separate streams without dividing the land, I don't know. I haven't seen tv sets in apartments before, unless it was somehow divided.

You could put a big screen youtube player or something out by the pool/common area. It would encourage people to gather there, instead of watching tv indoors. (Although they could also cam outside.)

One one plot? Can't be done. (at least using LL supplied land tools. There might be some kind of script or something that would direct the listener to a different stream.)


You have to subdivide if you want to each apartment to have it's own stream.

The TV and the radio are two different streams. You have one of each on each plot.

SL tv streams are free. So is America's Free Tv, although the stations go out from time to time. A lot of the free TVs in SL are set up to show AFTV or SL TV.

In apartment building with 20 units, the tenants will have to share the one stream. Why you don't see many multiple unit rental buildings.


Edit:
Another good reason to subdivide into 9 smaller plots, it will make prim control much easier.

And none that I do see, have tv sets.

Probably if you put in any sort of tv, they will appreciate it, although they would be sharing a stream. But how many times would everyone want to watch tv in their SL apartment at the same time, anyway?

If you divide the land into parcels with the building on one and the common area on another parcel, and put a nicer, bigger tv that anyone can watch outdoors in the common area, I think your tenants will be happy with it.

What most people seem to want in an apartment is something cheap where they can lock the door and change in private. Anything extra is a bonus.

Thanks for all the responses. I think my understanding of streaming, or lack thereof is the problem. So my parcel has one audio and one video stream? Ok. So each apartment simply accesses one of those streams. But how? What are the procedures for setting that up?

Let's say two or more apartments access the same audio or video stream at the same time. Will this cause a problem?

I like the idea of only putting a big screen down by the pool which may attract more people to that area. But, I'd rather only do that as a last resource.

6 of the 8 apartments are pretty standard (furnished, sex bed, fireplace, cuddle rug, etc), but the two top floor apartments each have a jacuzzi tub, full bar, and I was hoping a big screen (would be great for sports related parties, music videos, etc).

I don't really know what people expect from a $500/wk apartment but I'm trying to offer them a great deal.

I thank you for helping me out. I feel like I'm in the dark here...lol.

Hey Mystic, welcome to the forums! A little background info, please forgive me if you knew this already: If you bring up the "About Land" menu for your parcel and go to the Media tab, you will see a place to enter a Media (aka video/TV) URL and, lower down, a place to enter a music URL. At any one time, those two streams are the ONLY ones active in your parcel. A TV that has multiple "channels", and radios that have multiple "stations", are actually just changing their respective stream URL via a script.

OOPs! hit submit accidently! Edit:

So within your parcel, all the TVs will be tuned to the same channel at all times. There is generally no problem more than one TV is on at the same time. If more than one person is at home at a time they could easily get into a channel-flipping war

Are the units stacked vertically? If not it will be pretty simple to subdivide and name them "Apartment 1"............and so on. For $500L/wk I would expect a private stream.

Subdiving won't cost you any more than you are paying now, unless you advertise each one on it's own.

Hello Nika,

Thank you for the welcome.



The units are stacked. Four are stacked on the left side, with an elevator shaft in the center and then four stacked on the right side, totaling four floors/8 apts.

I think I'm going to have to do shared streams. That should work out ok. Thanks for all the help!

It can be done, apparently it's not that reliable and I spoke to someone who said it's not worth the hassle.

Qie knows more about this.

Personally from what I've seen apartments don't work in SL they are too close together Skyboxes can but still you have the problem that parcel settings in SL are only 2 dimensional. You'd thnk land would be controlled in 3D in a 3D world, but that's not the case.
Also be ready for possible failure as there is a lot of competition in Landlording and a lot of it are people who have full sims and are paying lower tier per prim to Linden Labs than you. Have fun trying but don't expect to be able to throw your RL job in next week. The more tennats you have the more wok you need to put in too of course it can be a full time job for some with the earnings not worth it compared to RL work.

Sorry, I missed this thread altogether until now. Yes, it's possible to have multiple media streams visible on the same parcel at the same time, but only one stream per viewer. The scripting for this uses the PARCEL_MEDIA_COMMAND_AGENT argument in the llParcelMediaCommand() function. As far as I can tell, it's as reliable as anything about parcel media (which is to say: not so much, depending mostly on the health of the viewer host's Quicktime installation, network connectivity, and the flakiness of the streams themselves).

The tricky bit about it is really the UI: how does a media display screen know which agents to whom it should show stuff? Proximity is one way, of course, or letting each agent choose by touching the screen they want to watch. The part that really doesn't work well is synchronizing the streams between multiple agents--but that doesn't work reliably anyway, regardless of whether multiple streams are being shown on the parcel or not.

For a sort of idiosyncratic demo of how this works, check out my "Rite of Passage" build near the center of the Tussock sim (just beyond the abandoned SLRR train). It uses this trick applied to web media (instead of video streams) to provide information about adult verification, specific to the language being used in the viewer. With PARCEL_MEDIA_COMMAND_AGENT, two people can view the same display board with one of them seeing it in Dutch, say, and the other in Japanese--at the very same time.

It happens that I also sell a little skybox thingy on Zindra that is a more residential version of the same idea, allowing different video to show on different levels; it decides which one to show to the viewer based on collision with the corresponding floor prim. There must be, however, other more general scripts for sale or maybe even for free somewhere that would fit the OP's application. I'm vaguely recalling something that may have been called "SilverStream" or something like that, perhaps associated with AWM Mars (if I'm even remembering that name correctly ) Also, Media Hax has something called SLiPOD that's based on the same scheme, but I'm not sure exactly what direction that product has taken.

Anyway, if nothing else pans out, IM or PM me and I'll see if I can figure out some less idiosyncratic way to package the functionality. (Just be advised that I'm lazy and totally unreliable. )

Oh, also, note that this is *only* for "media" streams--no way to do it with the parcel audio. Supposedly it's possible to get audio to stream on the parcel media... but I vaguely recall some LSL bug in that, so I wouldn't count on that working reliably, if at all.

Wow, cool, thanks Qie! Do you know if there are commercially available television systems that support this video multi-streaming? Is that something that one could do via a media plugin into LL's new API?

Sorry, OP, for the misleading references I made above re: media streams.

Well, I overcame my laziness just enough to check that indeed there is a product called "Silver Stream" that seems to do this (it appears to use sensors and user-specified ranges to determine who sees which stream). This isn't a recommendation or anything--I don't know this commercial market at all, and the scripting is not so intricate or mystical that there should need to be a dearth of such products. (Unfortunately, the "SLiPOD" product I mentioned seems to have mostly disappeared from in-world Search; IIRC, that was also a content programming service, so it may have not been quite the product for this application anyway.)

I can't speak authoritatively to the new media API, but I believe that's something rather different, applying more to the range of media types that can be defined for SL, with those types supported by custom plug-ins to be installed on the viewer machine, at least AFAIK.

In my core-dump of a post, I neglected to mention that the "one stream per viewer" limit, although accurate, is a bit misleading. It's also possible to stream multiplexed video content--e.g., one video source per quadrant of a stream--and demux those sources by simply offsetting the media texture on the display prim. The complexity is in constructing those very special multiplexed video streams.

The only possible way I can see being able to have different audio streams for your residents on a per-viewer basis is to bypass the parcel media settings entirely and direct your residents to launch their chosen streams on an external media player. Same for video, which totally defeats the purpose of having the in-world TV's to begin with.

I run a high rise apartment building. It's early days yet, so I can't say if it will be successful or not. Here's what I did:

- I divided the land into 6 parcels. Two of the parcels are for detached rental units, so they have their own audio and media streams. One is for the club/bar area. There is one parcel underneath the north wing of the high rise, and another under the south wing. The last parcel is "everything else" on the property.

There are ten rental apartments in the high rise. This means that five apartments all share a parcel, and thus an audio and media stream. Any tenant can tune the parcel audio or media, but then all residents on that parcel will receive that particular stream.

We have instructions about that in our tenant information, and encourage tenants to be courteous and avoid "radio wars". So far there have been no problems, but we also have few enough tenants that there haven't been any conflicts.

Sure, there are ways around this. I could do a different build...skyboxes, each over their own little parcel, or a couple of rows of beach cottages...but I like the look of the big high rise, and there are people who enjoy the closer sense of community in such a build. Maybe it will come to individual parcels eventually, but for now...the high rise stays.

Yes, that part is possible too. I did it over 18 months back with an editor that takes a video source and an audio source and merges them into a single media stream, and the good news was if you pointed the video source to a bitmap image, instead of regular video, it would use that image on every frame (you have probably seen the same thing on Youtube, where videos consist of a single image with the track playing in the background).

I will try to either find the post or the editor I used, but as that was on my old PC it may be some time.

Rock

edit: Here is the original thread, from 2007, which includes a script.

/54/95/209152/1.html

My message, under my alt of Rock Ryder mentions this technique, unfortunately I did not name the editor, so I will have to search.

I just Googled Photo to mpg and found lots of editors that take your photos, an audio track, and creates an mpg from it (which can then be converted to anything you like). You don't have to have many photos, one will do (and it doesn't have to be a photo, any image will do). Here is one example I found:
http://www.dvdcopyrip.com/extra-photo-to-video-converter.html

Rock

Ah. Perhaps it was later than that when they added the various media types (like html), such that one *should* be able to just use PARCEL_MEDIA_COMMAND_TYPE, "audio/*" ... except that it's buggy for audio, especially (it seems) on Windows. Coincidentally, overnight a similar-sounding problem arose with the new media plugin api according to a post on the devlist, so I dug up the thread about the problem: . Couldn't locate a corresponding jira in a cursory search.

Certainly if one has an mpg stream with an audio track, that should work with the video media type without impact from that bug.

That's a good link you posted, Rock, because it shows a sample script using the PARCEL_MEDIA_COMMAND_AGENT thing I was mumbling about above, apropos the multiple streams per parcel thing.