movie rental - how does this work?

Ok, so I'm standing at a movie rental place wanting to pick up a film to watch with my partner, but.. I may be daft but the "instructions" I find here are not clear enough for me. It says I'll get a video box like the one on the shelves that I'll rez and deed to group, and then play from the boxes menu. "It's that simple". Ok, but then I'm wondering, is this supposed to override streaming media on the parcel and have the movie play on a tv/texture we had set to do that from before? Will the film be displayed on the box itself? If anyone is able to clarify this I'll be very thankful.

Have you tried contacting the owner of the rental place? It's really their job to support their own products.

I find experiences from other customers (good or bad) very helpful, which is why I posted the question here.

Experiences, good or bad, opinions, recommendations - sure, that all makes sense. And sometimes, with regard to very popular products or scripting tactics, you'll get good answers here.

But how do you expect the sellers to ever improve their documentation if you don't let them know the problems with it?

It's not just SL, and I hope you don't take this as picking on you. I'm getting tired of software vendors everywhere putting out mediocre documentation and relying on their users to donate free technical support for their commercial benefit.

It's perfectly ok for you to ask the question here, and I'm sorry if it didn't sound that way. It's just that I believe asking the seller is a better approach.

the problem here is theirs probably a couple hundred movie rental places in SL and theirs got to be just as many ways to play a video how can we help if we dont even know what your looking at?
normally it replaces the video on your land but it could be just links to you tube your buying
most come as a TV you say this one is a box?
all this depends on the creator

Well, have you tried following those instructions?

Note that deeding to group is only necessary if the land itself is deeded to/owned by a a group. If it is owned by you personally, you can skip that step.

As for the rest, there's no way to know how they implemented their movie system. I mean, there's some basic functionality we can assume on the backend, but there's no way to know how they set up the user interface to it.

I'd say follow what instructions you have, and see what happens, or contact the seller/creator.

I have no instructions beyond those mentioned that are posted on a sign in the store, since I was hoping someone here would be able to give a pointer as to how it worked before spending money on it (as in recognising the "instructions" I mentioned). Apparantly noone does, so oh well.

Any SL movie rental works by replacing the video texture on your land with a new link. Some of them just give you the URL in chat or as hovertext and make you put it into the land yourself. Others try to change the URL themselves; for that to work the rental box has to be owned by the same resident or group as the land, so if the land is owned by a group you have to first set the rental box to the appropriate group and then deed it to the group. Still others might use PARCEL_MEDIA_COMMAND_AGENT in llParcelMediaCommandList() to let you watch the movie without actually changing the land URL, but the object still has to have the ABILITY to change the land URL for that to work so the same issues of object ownership apply.