Quicktime

worked nicely, even worked well on a sphere (with a seam of course)

Daniel Linden says that it won't work on attachments, though earlier had said would work on hair texture. something about the textrues being 'baked' onto the AV


the new button on the edit screen, texture page aligns the image onto the face.

You can use all texture commands to manipulate the QT, I was working on a small box (it was crowded) but could pan so only a corner of the movie was showing. did get some artifacting when scrolled off edge of movie


Be interesting to see if can put a VR movie onto the inside of a hollow cylinder.


They where using "Blue Plasma" from the Library as the display texture.

I also noticed a slight choppiness when regards to the movies being played for an extended period of time.

Here's the solution to the problem. This isn't related to SL at all, its a feature within Quicktime itself.

Under Quicktime Player (latest version):

Edit/Preferences/QuickTime Preferences/Instant On - Make sure this is checked, also, put the Play streams: slider all the way to the left which is instantly. This will eliminate most if not all choppiness.

I just spent over an hour watching videos in the preview grid. Music videos, movie trailers, funny clips, whatever we could find to play. Some of the videos were a little choppy or would restart a lot, but we were chalking it up to the stream itself. Overall, very cool! There was about six of us there the whole time and we were having a blast.

Einsman, thanks for the preference tip, I will check it out.

*EDIT. The attached pic is one potential problem with streaming video.

*Edit*...

I found what appears to be a windows version of Darwin Streaming Server. I dont have time to test it tonight to see if it is a limited version or not, but it may be what we all need to use this. It didnt turn up easily in my initial searches.... my bad. Here is the URL to the site. You have to have an apple account to get to the binaries...

http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/streaming/

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Old Message:

Unless I am missing something here, I'm still trying to figure out the wisdom in choosing QUICKTIME as the video format for SL....

I know it's flexible and all with playback... but your average joe isn't going to be able to stream it as far as I can tell. There are very few server solutions for it, and Apple's only solution seems to be for Mac only (Darwin/OSX). I know quicktime can also do HTTP streaming, but that will be more like a download than a stream. Not the same thing at all. Live events wont be viable, nor will webcams and stuff like that. It will be nothing like the ease of doing a shoutcast server for audio.

Like I said, maybe someone here knows of a free quicktime streaming server that works in windows, but I haven't been able to find one yet. Does the HTTP soltion work well enough, or will Video in SL be limited to people who have macs and the Darwin streaming server software, or people willing to pay for a 3rd party stream provider? I'm paying enough for land in SL, I don't care to pay more for a provider for video.

The video is really cool on the surface, but it doesn't appear to be something we will all get to use.

Just as Oceas has pointed out once the glammer is gone the point remains as to how most of us will use this. Unless i am missing something i think that QT is nice and all but not the way we would like it to go. IMO (as i said before unless i am missing something) Video in SL needs to be as easy as plugging into someone's Shoutcaster server. A simple IP address and port.

A good solution would be a universal Protocall that both Windows and Mac users can use to stream with ease. Web cam confrinces, yada, yada, yada. with out this type of ease of use i think this would become a feature that would very quickly fade out of use in SL. Eather there needs to be support for mpeg/asx/asf/ whatever or there needs to be a middle ground from which we as users dont need to run to third parties to stream for us.

The one thing that is bad about this, is that there may be no middle ground as far as a median for Vid streaming is consurned. but If QT is used. More then likely most of us will quickly see there is no use for it, for us unless we are willing to pump more money into a streaming server.

Video in SL is a GREAT idea. Dont get me wrong but unless im missing something, this is not the right way to go about it.

Sorry for any typo's there my be. its 5 am my time at this post and i worked all night.

::EDIT::

Sorry didnt make myself clear. My opinion stated above is from the view of Us as players trying to make our own streams.

I, for one, am very excited about the prospect of video. Sure, it is potentially expensive for now ... but think of the applications!

For example, I am *really* interested in making my Second Life new player instructional video (see my call for help in this post)

There are one or two details to iron out but I think this will be an outstanding feature, just like the addition of streaming audio was.

--Jack Lambert

Quicktime can play MPEG4
http://www.apple.com/mpeg4/

I'm talking in terms of streaming to SL

Video DOES work on attachments, I had a whole avatar that was a giant multiple video player.

Video works on the following:

- Prims (attached or not)

- Land (yes, it streams perfectly onto land if the textures match)

- Hair (kinda, I think)

Video does not work on:

- Avatar clothing: the reason being the textures are "baked", i.e. pre-rendered (I think) and slapped onto your avatar, they are not static.

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Thats as far as I know from testing.

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I heard that other formats may later be added to the streaming, quicktime is what they went with for a start.

Has anyone tried streaming from a webcam??

Yep, check out this thread

--Jack Lambert

/clap clap clap!

W00t metaverse here we come!

I found out this morning if you make a prim on somebody elses land and use the same texture the video will still show. You can also move it to another parcel and still see the video as long as you stay on the parcel the streaming video is on. And there is a cool effect when you turn the prim transparant and when you use different colors.

What happens when there are lots of objects in the area with video streaming textures? Does it try to open them all or is there a limit? If there's a limit is it in terms of the number of connections or in terms of total bandwidth used?

Although this feature could be very useful, without connection limits it could also be a great tool for griefers. It could also potentially even be used as a DDOS tool by flooding the world with objects that pointed everyone's client to a single web server.

It seems like an extension to the audio streaming facility, but it is subtly different in that only land owners can set a streaming audio url, there is only one url per parcel and a limited number of users will be in a particular parcel at a time (and although multiple land owners may use the same url, it's unlikely they would all chose to pick on one server at once).

There's another quesiton I have which is why go straight for streaming video when the ability to signal a client to retrieve an image from the web as a texture would be even more widely useful. Maybe you can do this as I know quicktime can open still image files (it used to register itself to handle the png mimetype on Windows!), but why rely on quicktime when to code to do this would be trivial to add to the SL client itself. If you had this an object designer could set a URL that triggered a CGI (or servlet or whatever) to produce a custom image using GD (or whatever). That would allow for dynamically updating noticeboards without using massive arrays of XYText objects.

Have you tried it Richard ?

It IS the same as streaming audio.
Only one stream per parcel, set by the landowner.

Its done in the "about land" menu, by choosing a texture, and linking it to a url.

Then wherever you put that texture, on that parcel, there (potentially) is the video.

I'm not certain but I think each client sees its own version. Since it comes direct from the non-LL server, different people may surely be playing different parts of some types of streamed recording. It seemed to me that the pause button, etc acted only for the person that touched them. Need two people to test. Asking the hyped up person standing next to you what he sees doesnt necessarily give a reliable answer, sadly.

If I'm right, nobody sees video unless they touch to request it.

Cant get back in to complete tests.

Oh yes, and each time I backed over the parcel boundary, the video died, to be replaced by the static ordinary texture which had been chosen. They seem to have accepted a bug report on this - does this mean it IS a bug?

No, I'm not in a position to actually try it. I have to go on what others say which I've obviously misinterpreted.

OK, so it's not as dangerous nor as useful as I'd assumed.