Free video streaming into Second Life

Well I haven’t done any machinima posts of late, but I can feel a few in the offing having just completed one concept video for a client and with the promise of a few more lurking not too far in the distant future.

The machinima I’ve been doing has generally been of the type you use when you can’t do a live demonstration of SecondLife, it’s been produced to either illustrate potential scenarios/concepts or show case existing business aspects of secondlife. The venue for displaying this machinima has been at trade shows or during large presentations.

Video and particularly Machinima seems to keep cropping up in my day to day job at the moment, a client I’m currently working for has a need for a streamed video service for use at events. We want something reliable but cheap that we can use for the occasional streaming of a live event etc. into Second Life (any suggestions welcome

The one service I have been playing with at the moment is a startup called Veodia (veodia.com) which is currently in beta. It’s very similar to another beta startup
called ustream (ustream.tv) the one distinct and important difference (with my SL oriented slant) is that it makes available the video stream in quicktime format. Meaning that it can be streamed straight into Second Life with no conversion faffing or trouble finding dedicated servers to run a Darwin streaming server on.

Ian pointed me at Veodia a few weeks ago, however it took my account registration email some time to materialise (it was trapped in Hotmails spam catcher) so I was a bit slow off the mark in checking out what format the streaming was done in. Kevin Aires as ever the video streaming investigator got in there and found it was quicktime compatible and blogged within IBM about getting a Veodia stream into SL.

After finally getting into my account yesterday I started up my softcam desktop streaming app, set up a quick feed on veodia, grabbed the rtsp link from a view source and set the media url for my land parcel in Ukanipo.

Here’s the result a slightly disturbing world within world effect…

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So what you are seeing here is the result of softcam capturing my desktop video display output, streaming it up to veodia and then it being streamed into SecondLife. Infinite loop complete. (ps the quality is better when you don’t go for this wheels within wheels effect)

So whats this useful for ?

-video conferencing: pipe your webcam into SL without the need to host your own streaming server.
- live demos: do desktop sharing to a crowd in SL so you can do demonstrations from other apps (shared browsing or 3d app tutorials anyone?), simutaneously visible on the web stream too.
- world tours: get all your guests into one place with a screen in SL and then disapear off streaming your secondlife journey back to the assembled SL crowd.
- video link parts of SL: running a live event over several islands ? then provide video linkups between each of the islands so everyone can see what’s going on.

best of all veodia which is in beta is currently free, oh and it records too