Streaming Video On a Prim: Possible?

Hello,

I'm a non-landowner interested in streaming video to a prim. Is this possible? How? If not what is the animated texture alternative.

Cheers,
Douglas Douglas

Streaming media is a function of land, so if you don't own any land, you won't be able to do it. If you're a member of a group that owns some land though, you may be able to do it on the group's land. It depends on how the group has it set up.

As for animating textures, that's not a viable option for anything other than very short animations. It's not meant for playing movies, but for things like waterfalls, fire, Christmas lights, that sort of thing.

The way it works is you put a tiled series of frames onto a single canvas, and then that single image is moved across the object surface at speed. The result is what appears to be an animation, in much the same way as a filmstrip appears to be a motion picture.

The limiting factor (the "length of the film" is the size of the canvas, which in SL, can be no more than 1024x1024 pixels. That means if your frames are 256x256, you can only have 16 of them. At normal film speed, that's just a hair over half a second of footage. If you want more frames, you have to make the frames smaller. 256 frames, for example, would give you almost 11 seconds of playback at 24 FPS, but each frame would be only 64x64 pixels, which is nowhere near enough for anything resembling a movie.

Bottom line, if you want to do video in SL, get some land.

Thanks very much Chosen Few.

One last thing, can you clarify the reasoning for linking the video stream to a parcel? I'm an an animator and I'd love to be able to stroll up to someone and rez a few animation for their enjoyment as a performance art thing. I'll bet there are others thinking along the same line as myself.

Presumably it's a bandwidth issue?

Cheers,
Douglas Douglas

It's also a legal issue. Imagine you turn up and are a griefer and rez prims that stream kiddy porn, then leave. Who gets done for it? Under the current system, that's easy, under more permissive systems, much harder.

Also, each parcel can currently only have one stream, your idea, nice though it is, would let you hijack my stream etc...

I think the expression is "can of worms"

yes it is possible to stream video, or media in general on a prim even if ur not a land owner... but the only way it will work is if u got the right texture. See in land options u select a sertain texture to display media on a prim with the same texture. so if u lay out a box with that texture on that sertain parcel.. then yay// u did itt o,o

While technically true, how is this useful? Only the landowner can control the stream, and in many if not most cases, the landowner will the only one who has the particular texture to which the media is mapped.

On the off chance that a passer by can identify the texture that the landowner chose for media, and that the traveler himself has the same texture with the same UUID, then yes, he could apply that texture to a prim and watch the landowner's video stream on it (at least until the prim disappears due to parcel auto-return). The traveler won't be able to change the stream to a video of his own, and he won't be able to take his media player with him off of that particular plot of land. So, how do you see this as a viable option for anyone to do anything useful?