DVD and Movies

This is probably a noob question, so if you have somewhere I can read about it great, but i couldn't find anything real helpful.

I see lots of DVD stores to buy or rent movies? How does this work? What do I need to watch them? Can they only be watched in SL? I've seen movie theaters and kind of understand those, but what about the DVDs? Also, is the quality any good? Do they just stream when you want to watch them, or do you download the whole movie?

Any help would be great, thanks?

Second Life supports two different types of external media.. Music and Videos.

Video is played within SL on a prim that uses the media texture (located in the About Land options). To get Video into SL, you have two options. If the video is small, you can simply put the video on a website and then the URL to the video in your land settings.

If the video is larger than a couple minutes, then your going to need what's called a streaming video server to stream the video content from the internet to the viewers SL media prim/TV. This is how the people that sell or rent movies in SL do it.

To stream, you'll need something like Apple's darwin streaming server, and a computer with sufficient outgoing bandwidth to feed video to all the people watching it on your parcel (something that generally a home cable/dsl connection is underpowered for).

edit: I thought I should add that in all likelyhood, the majority (if not all) commecially available DVD video content (aka blockbuster movies) are being streamed illegally without the consent of the studios.. something to consider.

There are several free TV's out there for you to use, like CrystalShard Foo's that come with several TV stations built in.