.FLV videos

It would be awesome of SL could play .flv videos... That would open up the world to the magic of youtube and dailymotion.

+1

After reading the forum awhile.. should probably just hope and wait for the html on a prim thing to start up..

Has this changed at all in the past few months? I would love to see .flv support.

FLV is evil.

I'm going to agree with Argent. I have yet to see anything of actual worth on .flv (not having witnessed anything NOT of worth as .flv not withstanding).

Calling it evil won't make it go away. Show me a video sharing platform as popular as youtube that uses .mov files and I won't be so interested in seeing FLV in SL.

what about mkv , ogm or videolan streams?

If we have to present niche formats lets present at least the ones that are worth something?

Yeah, but to be fair, Youtube isn't exactly a "niche" anymore.. it's more like the Grand Canyon. That being said, it's still evil, terribly lossy, and not worth the hassle of integrating with the viewer. (my opinion)

A giant hole in the ground into which we could throw anything if we so desired?
(Not to say that the Grand Canyon isn't worth keeping not-a-trash-dump)

I don't love the codec myself either, but these sites have the largest amount of user video content that is easy to access and easy to distribute. Granted, much of that may be garbage as well, but the people that put it there love it and not everything in SL is top notch either, who am I to judge, to each his own. The point is that SL and these sites are both worlds that exist because of user created content and they would work well together (conceptually, not necessarily technically).

Why are flash videos considered evil? I mean, they are low bandwidth (compared to other video codecs) and get the job done... and every OS has support for it. I think it would be a good idea.

At the moment, I can't see any video in SL. I'm running the Linux client.

Flash is a programming environment. Flash videos can contain actionscript and can do pretty much anything a web page can, including acting as web-bugs MUCH more easily than quicktime or mpeg, since the person placing the web-bug doesn't have to provide the streaming for it. Flash videos can also be significantly more computationally intensive than anything else, and thus lag the client more.

I'd like better performance out of what they have in it already
I can't watch the videos, even when they stream correctly I get terrible FPS in world, while if I open it up on my second monitor in quicktime (if I can get the URL) WHILE PLAYING SL it runs great.

Other lag issues aside, the videos usually play just fine for me. The problem is that less and less content is available in QT format these days since the bulk is going flv. Apple's movie trailers are getting really old...

This is known as "the race to the bottom".

That may or may not be the case, certainly the sites using flv are doing so for a reason.
Also, flash is a web programming platform but actionscript is delivered through the .swf format and .flv is simply a compressed video delivery format that relies on a client player the same way quicktime does. Granted different compression scheme, but its still not the worst I've seen. And as far as client lag quicktime is often slower to start and requires more resources in general. But that aside if SL incorporated a flash player that could include .swf as well and imho would open up some very interesting possibility for good and bad, malicious programmers can work with any language.

Despite the fact it's Apple that would need to be asked to support the format, not LL...

FLV is based on the Sorenson Squeeze (IIRC) codec which is already supported in Quicktime, so adding support would be pretty easy - just a case of demuxing and removing the alpha channel, I think.

Yea if Apple supported it directly in QT that would be a treat.

Someone with a Mac fancy trying this?

Then how come different flash video sites have different look and feel for their players, if the player UI isn't encapsulated somehow?

Because they all have different Flash-based player applets. If you check your browser's requests you'll see one for a .swf - the player, which is the same on every page, and one for a .flv - the video, which is different on every page. It's possible, assuming there's no server-side checks to prevent it, to play the video with your own player if you've got it's URL.

inevitably bandwidth intensive webpages will end up on every. single. prim. within draw distance in many areas and living somewhere broadband is increasingly subject to caps and restrictive FUPs, ubrowser integration is something i'm dreading.

It's almost a certainty that there'll be a limit on the number of pages SL will display at a time, and likely that you'll be able to alter it yourself or turn it off if you want to. I wouldn't worry, in fact I'd be happy about it - it'll mean people can use a text for text rather than images and actually save you bandwidth.

ah! thanks for that silver lining AJ =)