Movies in SL

ok - i have the sl tv. It says it plays dvds and i know you can buy/rent them in sl. BUT - how can i watch a dvd i own in rl - how can it be uploaded or linked? For that matter - is it possible?

I rarely see Movies listed in "events" If i am on my own land with my own tv with my own dvd - it's legal right?

I don't know about the legality of it, but the TV probably has a notecard that you can update to point to movies stored on your computer, so that it knows where to play them from. It should have come with some sort of manual that tells you how to do it.

I don't think you can stream movies directly from your computer. All streaming video I have seen comes from website sources. I've looked around for options for renting movies and all I found for rent was porn. I think the licensing rights to rent out mainstream movies might be too complicated and expensive for anyone to be interested in doing so. My tv needs a website source for any personal playlist that has the movie in quicktime playable format, i.e. the website url has to end in .mov etc.

To place a movie into SL, you convert it to a Quicktime file or some other media format that would be playable on a website, by adding that file to a web server. Since, technically, anyone who accesses that web seerver can access the video, it becomes a large grey area, that in doing this you are essentially "Presenting" the film to the whole Internet. There are no ways that I am aware of to access the content in-world while making it visible ONLY for you, and not for anyone else in SL.

For that reason, most of what you see on in-world TV screens is stuff that no one protects Copyright on, like porn films, or old black and white movies, or movie trailers that have been released for Internet access.

As a test, I have converted video to Quicktime files, placed them on my own web server, and viewed tem using a standard in-world TV from Dione's Designs (JZ Systems). It worked fairly well, so long as I had a very clean high-bandwidth connection and a fast computer to view it on.

But honestly, if you already have the DVD... just watch it at home, the normal way.

Quicktime is a bear...if one person crashes...he has to start the movie over again. Sort of ruins the fun of watching it together.

I have visions of an avatar sitting in front of their computer playing 'RL', with a webcam view of the account holder on the screen!!! I expect this has been done by someone, somewhere.

Since the content is accessed client-side you could run a local server to host the video (or music stream for that matter) and as long as you'd reference it with the "127.0.0.1" (loopback) addie, no one but you would see it.

Seems a bit silly considering the effort (especially time) involved in converting just a single full-length movie though.