Tools Required to Recode Video
There is a variety of software available for converting existing media into formats that are streamable into Second Life, but these articles will generally cover only two tools: VLC and mp4creator.
VLC is an Open Source media player that is quickly gaining popularity due to the large number of video formats it can read, allowing it to recode almost any source video for playback in Second Life. While VLC was not designed for recoding video, it does a very acceptable job for most content.
VLC can be freely downloaded at http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ for a variety of platforms.
One limitation of VLC is that is cannot produce the hint tracks needed for use with a streaming server (more on that later), but there are additional Open Source tools available to help overcome this shortcoming. Many useful tools for generating video for streaming are bundled together in a toolset called mpeg4iptools, available at http://ffdshow.faireal.net/mirror/mpeg4iptools/. Note that the tools are compressed with the 7-Zip compression format and can be extracted with the freely available 7-Zip file manager available at http://www.7-zip.org/. The tool we will be using is called mp4creator.exe and I recommend creating a C:\recoding directory as a working directory and extracting mp4creator.exe there.
Both tools mentioned in these articles are also available for Linux and Mac, but the instructions will be geared to Windows users.