Hosting Your Videos
Choosing a Host
Once you finish recoding your videos, you will need to host them on a server so they can be accessed from within Second Life. While you could host the videos from a home machine, there are many hosted options available with significantly less effort required for setup.
I personally use Dreamhost as my hosting provider. I selected Dreamhost based on their reasonable price ($10 per month) and generous storage and transfer allowances (500GB storage and 5TB of transfer per month). These limits essentially allow you to store as much video as you need and transfer it to SL without worrying about hitting any limits.
In addition, Dreamhost provides its users with a Quicktime Streaming Server, which you’ll see in upcoming articles is a very valuable service. Very few hosting providers give their users access to a streaming server so this also makes Dreamhost a good choice.
Dreamhost charges $49.95 for a setup fee but includes a domain registration with that fee so that you can get started right away without having to separately register a domain. If you use the promo code SLSTREAMING while signing up, Dreamhost will waive the activation fee on monthly subscriptions.
Uploading Your Videos
Once you have signed up with Dreamhost and registered your domain, you will be ready to upload videos for playback. I personally use an application called WinSCP for uploading my videos. WinSCP is Open Source and can be downloaded from http://winscp.net/eng/download.php.
Once WinSCP is installed, launch it and you will see a window similar to this:
Click the New button to add a profile for your Dreamhost account.
Fill in the domain name you registered as your Host name, the username provided by Dreamhost as your User name and the password provided by Dreamhost as your Password, then click the Save… button and choose a name for the profile and click the Ok button (I called mine simply ‘Dreamhost’).
Once you have saved your profile you will be returned to the login screen where you can double-click on your saved profile’s name in order to connect. Once you have connected you will see a screen similar to this:
The right side of the interface is the file system on your web server, the left side is the file system on your local computer. Browse into the directory named after your site (yourdomain.com) and you are ready to upload your videos.
You can upload your videos by either navigating to them on the left and dragging them to the right or by navigating to them in Windows and dragging them into the left-hand panel.
After you drag a file to the right panel, you will be presented with a dialog like the following:
Click the Copy button to begin the transfer. While the file is copying you will see a dialog like the following:
You can check the Disconnect when operation finishes box and click the Minimize button to move the dialog out of the way. When the copy is complete the application will close.
Testing the Video
Once your upload is completed, open Quicktime and choose File > Open URL… and enter the video URL in the dialog box. If your domain was foo.com and your file was named bar.mp4, your URL would be http://www.foo.com/bar.mp4. If your upload was successful and your file was properly named, the video should be displayed.
Once your video is showing in Quicktime you are ready to view it on your parcel.
Setting the Parcel Video URL
To set the video URL for a parcel, stand within the parcel and choose World > About Land… from the menu. The following window will be displayed:
Click on the Media tab to show parcel media options and paste your video URL into the with content from this URL: box. You should now be able to play the video. On your parcel by clicking the play button:
If you do not have a screen on your parcel you will have to create one. The simplest approach is to create a prim and apply the texture of your choice to it, then click the texture box in the Media tab of the About Land window and select the same texture you applied to your screen prim. The video will now play on the surface of your prim.
Summary
In this article we showed how to sign up for a host, upload videos, test them and apply them to our parcel. In upcoming articles we’ll review how to use the Quicktime Streaming Server provided by Dreamhost to allow viewers to skip forwards and backwards in the video.