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Land owners can stream both audio and video to their parcels to be enjoyed by anyone that visits their land. Here is a quick run through of how each works..

KEY POINTS

  • To see streaming movies, you must have Quicktime installed. Visit www.quicktime.com for the free download. Log out of Second Life, install Quicktime, and then log back into Second Life.
  • To see streaming videos, or hear streaming audio, you need to enable the options on the Audio/Video tab of your Preferences (ctrl-P).

STREAMING VIDEO

In the Media tab of your About Land window, you can enter a URL for streaming video. The url must be to a stream that is Quicktime compatible, which includes .mov files, and various other formats too.

To be able to see the movie stream you selected, Second Life has to know which surface you want to display it on. This is done by designating a texture as the "Media texture" in the Media tab of your About land window. Be sure to select a texture that you don't use elsewhere on the same land because any surface set to display that texture will also become a movie screen when one is playing. Once the Media texture is set in the Media tab, all thats left to do is apply the same texture to an object that you want to use as the movie screen, and its ready to play!

With a streaming movie URL set, a small Play button with volume slider will appear at the bottom of your screen, just above the Build button. Once you press Play your screen should play the movie for you. Do be patient, sometimes it can take a little while to get started. If you are having trouble, try testing the URL outside of Second Life in the Quicktime player itself. If it works in Quicktime player, it really should work in-world too.

STREAMING AUDIO

On the Media tab of your About Land window is a space to enter a streaming audio URL. The tick box above it allows you to avoid annoying the neighbors. There are many sources of compatible streams on the internet, perhaps the best known being www.shoutcast.com. Here are some simple instructions to follow:

  1. Point your browser at www.shoutcast.com
  2. Search for a music channel that you think you would enjoy, look for one that is not at its maximum listeners, and keep in mind that the higher the bitrate listed against it, the more bandwidth it will need.
  3. You will see a small yellow button that says Tune In, for the stream you have found. You are now going to save this as a file. In most browsers, simply right-click the yellow button and choose Save Target As.. or Save Link As.. This will drop a .pls (playlist) format file onto your hard drive.
  4. Using notepad or a similar text editor, open the .pls file and look for the URL listed inside it. Sometimes there are several, and they will usually include a port number. It will look something like.. http://12.345.12.888:80. Copy that URL then close notepad.
  5. In Second Life, open up your About Land window, and go to the Media tab. Paste the URL into the Audio field. Close the About Land window.
  6. You should now see a small volume control and Play button at the bottom of your screen. If not you may need to leave your land parcel and return. Press the Play button.
  7. You should now be able to hear the music. If not, do check that your preferences settings are correct (see the Key Points above).

Please keep in mind that the audio streams and video streams come directly to your Second Life viewer, they do not get streamed by us. None of this content comes via our servers at all, so performance issues with streams are outside of our control. Some streams reach a maximum number of listeners and then accept no more. Some have poor connections and may stutter or stop.