Hosting your own movies from your PC

Ok, I work in the computer industry for a living. I have never found a more poorly documented, hard to setup system as streaming your own movies from your own computer to SL. I can't even imagine how hard this will be for someone who's not that computer literate.

I got far enough in to realize I either needed Quicktime streaming server or Darwin streaming server. Since I pay enough now for this damn game I was not about to go buy QSS, so I got the free darwin setup.

Ok, got it installed, added Activeperl to my XP machine like it asks. Got the server saying that it's running. Went thru the minimal darwin documentation and got the IP address of my server with "Http://" in front of it and put it into my Movie URL field in SL.

.....Nothing.....

I have the texture setup and know how to do this as I already found a stream coming from somewhere else and just pasted the URL in there and it worked great. So what am I doing wrong here? Darwins admin page showed nobody connected, and I'm using port 80 to stream so there's no firewall issue here (and no i'm not running any other web service off that box).

I didnt get any results until I put a movie name (the 300bit_sample.mov that comes iwth Darwin setup) into the actual URL and refreshed my SL movie. It streamed then, but no other movie would do it, and I dont want to have to put an actual movie name in the URL box in SL, what's the point of having playlists otherwise?? As well, the WIKI says "any movie that plays in Quicktime will work in the stream" .... I call BS, doesnt work that way sorry.

Sorry to be crabby but I'm really lookin forward to watching movies on my land here and don't want to have to rely on someone else's connection or watch 1920's charlie chaplin flicks.

Thx

I haven't played with it yet, but a hunch tells me that you need to export your .mov files as Hinted for streaming. Give it a shot and tell us how it works!

http://helpqt.apple.com/qthelpwr2/english/QuickTimeHelp/pgs2/qtFmSet.htm

*edit* here is the URL for the actual topic:
http://helpqt.apple.com/qthelpwr2/english/QuickTimeHelp/pgs/c4qt7.html

I played around in preview with live streaming SL into SL. I used SOFTCAM, MPEGABLE BROADCASTER and DARWIN. It worked, after some trial and error. I did find, strangely, that others could see my video but I couldnt see it! It seems to be an issue with DARWIN or QUICKTIME (maybe just the SL implementation of QT) that you cant send a live stream and view it simultaneously on the same pc. That was with live video, though. When streaming playlists, I did see those videos.

Heres a question. What URL are you using to connect to the video? If you're streaming live content, the URL has to start with RTSP:// not HTTP://. What type of files are you trying to stream? .MOV movies?

Im interested in starting a small movie house, myself.

Well, I have a collection of mpg's and mov's. Not sure that they're hinted (probably not). I read today about the deal of making the movie hinted so I'll try that. It could be that i was seeing nothing cuz the movie was not hinted, therefore it was trying to upload the whole thing (300 Mb's in some cases) because it was not hinted. Therefore it just shows a grey screen until it uploads? Not sure on that.

I'll try making a hinted movie first, but my first try was using HTTP:// and my pc's public IP address. The attempt with RSTP just shows the Quicktime logo, and a series of dots at the bottom that are supposed to move to show it's loading, but they never move.

I ended up making it work by the following url format:

rtsp://1.2.3.4:554/filename.mov

I did have to go into my firewall and allow tcp:1220 and tcp/udp:554 to make it connect.

Ok that worked for me too, at least sort of

I made the movies hinted and used the rtsp://my.ip.address/movie.mov URL and it plays well for me.

Problem is - it only shows first frame or plays horridly slow & choppy for anyone else.

Any ideas?

how big of file can you send to view the mpegs I am sending like 300mb and i get nothing what does hinted mean??? Can someone help me know the correct procedure in doing this thanks.

Wow, I couldn't even get Darwin installed. Anyone love me enough to walk me threw that?

Grab the darwin zip file (sorry dont have the link handy) and unzip it to a folder of your choice (I went to C:\DarwinStreamingServer)

In that folder is a file called Install.bat, double click that and pay attention to any possible error messages. You'll definately need to install ActivePerl before running install.bat (google that, it's a free download).

Install.bat will ask you for username and passwords for your administration web page, be sure to put those in.

Once everything's installed, you should have a new folder in c:\program files called "Darwin Streaming Server". In there is a movie folder. Move all your hinted movies in there. You can choose a different folder to play from but I had no luck with that.

@Tommy - to make a hinted movie you need Quicktime Pro. Simply load the movie you want hinted and choose File-> export. In the dropdowns find hinted movie (at least that's what it is in QT Pro 6.5). There's an option box that I click that lets you choose a checkbox "Optimize Hints for Server". I had better luck with movies playing for other folks with this checked. Save the file to your darwin movies fodler.

Carrying on, from C:\Program Files\Darwin Streaming Server, double click streamingadminserver.pl, this will open a dos window, just leave it open and minimize it.

from a new Dos prompt (type CMD in a windows run box) change your directory to C:\Program Files\Darwin Streaming Server and type
DarwinStreamingServer.exe -d

This will start darwin up if it's not already.

To view your server's settings and playlists, go to a web browser and type in http://localhost:1220
You'll be asked to enter the username/pass you put in above. If it doesnt load the page right away, be patient, it takes perl a few seconds to get up & running. If it never loads be sure you have streamingadminserver.pl running (double clicked).

Keep in mind, I have yet to figure out how to get the streamed playlists to work, but I've been able to play one movie at a time. In my movies folder I have a movie called "1.mov". From SL's media box (about land - media tab) I put in my URL which is the format - rtsp://my.ip.address/1.mov
I would think that once you setup a playlist with known working movies, you could simply type rtsp://my.ip.address in the media tab and it would play your stream, but I guess i've hosed that somehow lol.

This works everytiime for me, but some videos dont play for the other people on my land. I know avi's converted to hinted .mov files dont play at all for anyone either, but mpg's and mpeg's both play fine for me and seem to be 50/50 for anyone else. Still trying to figure this one out.

Hope this helps, feel free to IM me IW if you have problems

Uhm, well i'm not sure what part of the 'computer industry' you work in, but anyhow.

You can stream movies via any server method that QT client will stream from. This includes just a standard web server. There's nothing complicated about this.

However, unless you have a ridiculously large amount of bandwidth, streaming in your 300mb video from your home PC isn't going to be an option. All that SL does is interface with QT as a client and display it client-side on a texture. Every client that sees that texture opens a connection to the stream in question (your home PC, in this case) to stream the video directly from it.

What does this mean? Unless you're doing very very low quality movies, you're looking at needing probably upwards of 5MB upstream minimum to stream to 2-5 clients.

Oh, and there shouldnt be any limit on total file size as it just send each section of the movie a little at a time.

The worst technology choice for streaming video is QUICKTIME.
Real and Windows Media are light years ahead in regards to codecs, editing and transport.

I'm not even going to bother as Quicktime is a waste of time. There is already too much lag in SL where there should not be. This method of streaming is not efficient.

I've very disapointed as I was really looking forward to video in SL.

Ceno I'd agree with you there about the technology, as well, there's much less movies available out there in QT format. TONS in wma and avi. At any rate, the lag thing isnt quite right. Considering, just like the music stream, the video stream does not go through SL but makes a private connection from your pc to the server showing the movie. You always have the option to not play it too

No need to be an ass si. It was a simple question from a very frustrated person.

And earlier today, according to Darwin's perl admin page, I was streaming 3 people at an average of 400-500 Kbps per person. All this from my lowly cable modem.

The point was more you were describing yourself to be proficient in the technology you were working with, but demonstrating no such knowledge. Streaming servers are a relatively complicated system to tune and set up, but you can provide streaming with a simple web server. It's not really the responsibility of LL to handle the outside requirements of a stream, just as they didn't with shoutcast/icecast tie-ins.

Anyhow, all of that side. 500kbps is a pretty light stream, I suppose it depends upon your goal. Usually the lowest quality which is used with most codecs for detailed reproduction (from what i've seen) is about 1200kbps in video. It's wholly possible to handle 400-500kbps streams from good cable/DSL. It's generally considered that below 1000kbps in motion video too much detail is lost to be considered an accurate reproduction, however.

Back to my original point -- if you want to stream video publically in SL, you probably want to go through a streaming service of some sort. I was trying to point out more than streaming video would not be a recommended course of action from a standard residential network offering. Most have an upstream cap between 128k and 512k, which isn't really sufficient for even a single stream (assuming even 500kbps stream, ack stream overhead, return traffic from SL, there just isn't enough there).

Basically, can you do it? Yes -- However, the performance problems you describe with stopping, choppiness, loading delay, etc are all going to be expected symptoms of doing it on a residential connection and a PC. While I don't think that LL has documented it, it's not fair to turn that particular blame on them -- a knowledge of streaming media servers would show you how resource demanding they really are.

As is shown above, I never claimed to be a streaming video IT professional (my particular strong suit is Cold Fusion and network/desktop support), I was claiming that the documentation provided by LL was minimal, even non existent. E.G. "Here's this great new service, now you're on your own to figure it out". Very unprofessinal if you ask me. If you're gonna flaunt it, provide some documentation on how to use it! It's basic to me.

Since you're saying my cable connection will be a crappy source for streaming, and since I have a T1 available to me, can you help me in finding some documentation on how to setup a relay, so I can broadcast the movies from here to that T1 server, but let it hand out the streams?

Uhm... Quicktime is actually superior in a few ways.

It's not my player of choice for media, but streaming-wise WMA doesn't render in 3D environments as far as I know. The only one that has been working on rendering video and other 2D technologies in 3D environments has been the Quicktime people...

and they've been doing it since the mid-90's.

I think quicktime was the only obvious choice. In fact it was probably the best one in many ways. Performance wise -- I've seen nothing poor or laggy about it. I can render dozens of media textures streaming a video clip with a very small performance hit.

Why? Because quicktime has been developed for this kind of application for years.

windows media and real player suck ass.

Unfortunately, I don't know the specs of your cable. However, a T1 is synchronous 1.544mbit/sec. Also not sufficient for significant streaming. That's really the problem with streaming resources -- the I/O is extreme.

If you assume that you're going to stream a 500kbps stream to a peak of 10 clients, you have 5000kbps of upstream to account for. Unfortunately, with the way network circuits work, there's no physical medium ideal for this outside of a 10mbit full duplex ethernet connection. An affordable circuit for most business needs being a T1 has a theoretical max throughput of ~1290kbps, which would only handle 2 clients for the stream.

I would suspect the reason that LL doesn't provide any documentation on how to stream media to it is because it's not realistic to expect that many people will be able to provide their own stream source. Those who can, are operating on circuits upwards of a DS3 @45mbps (you're looking at $50,000/mo recurring costs here), and when one is working with such level of systems, they can probably undertake the necessary steps to provide a functional media server.

Does that make more sense as to why they wouldn't go through documentation on setting up a streaming source?

Ok people, let's quit flauntin our knowledge of formats here & get back to the question shall we? If LL isnt gonna document this stuff it's up to us to get it sorted out & let the rest of the community know about it

What I'd like to see happen:
1) A complete step by step process of how to get darwin installed (complete with download links) on your computer.
2) A step by step guide on getting ActivePerl installed
3) A step by step guide on who to get your streaming server up & running once it's installed
4) A guide on what sort of movies are compatible with QT pro export, and *exactly* how to export a hinted movie.
5) What sort of bandwidth is needed to stream a movie (with example cases)
6) A guide to how to setup your Url in SL (e.g. rtsp:// not http://, with port #'s if you run with a router in your LAN)
7) How to setup a relay to a stream broadcaster on a different system.
Have someone beat LL into putting out a patch to keep me from crashing every time I push play

I've worked thru quite a few of these but still have yet to see success in game. C'mon people, let's get this solved

i use a simple web server and point to my short movies files

Ok, I did just that. Moved the movies up to a server connected to a T1 (only 2 people gonna be watching it anyway, not a big deal).

The movies play fine, but they dont *stream*. They have to be full downloaded before they play. Thank God I tried it first with a 3Mb file instead of 300Mb or I would've given up before I realized that.

Did I convert these movies wrong? I exported them from QT Pro as a hinted .mov file.

Kyrah... just curious--what web server are you using and on what platform?

Thanks!

Im no xpert but i have a webserver (globat.com)
and i have had success with my anime music videos,
in mpg1,mov,mp4,3gp. formats im not streaming
as far as know my server does not support it.
and most start right away with in seconds
with exception of some mpg files.
these are mostly 20-60mb file sizes and i was
showing them to about 7ppl at one time,
till i found out my server limits bandwith daily
but i did find 3gpp will take a 55mb file and
convert it to 1.5mb filesize, yes its lesser
quality but good enough for me it looks good
unless your right on top of the screen im still
testing but i think im gona stick with 3gpp
format and i wrote a button script to load
videos that works well.
oh and windows media works in a 3D enviroment
activeworlds has been using it for sometime now
and you can add videos anywhere in the worlds
i like it because wmv you can adjust the
bandwidth easily.
sorry if this post looks funny im on my
sidekick at work ;p
-LW

I'd personally love to know what encoder/settings you're using (specifically) to turn 20-60meg music vids into 1.5meg ones (throw us a link to product/download?). I also use a similiar setup of just linking to a movie via a simple webserver. (There are many free packaged setup webservers out there that are very user friendly to set up).

right now im trying nokia media converter
dont have a link im at work on a sidekick
search it in google. you have to regester to
recive a key to install it. it claims to convert
mpg,avi,mov to 3gpp its a small file made for
cellphones but i weigh bandwith over quality
and it still looks great for the size.
i have used it on mpg file and worked greay
still testing it. QTpro will do 3gpp too
but not some mpgs they lose sound, you
can use another converter to make an mpg
that works with QT but i dont want to
have to convert twice most of my anime
music videos are in avi or mpg. and in wmv
because i had them in activeworlds.
-LW