I like this. I bounced up and down on my seat clapping my hands when I got this working.

Today I streamed video and audio live from my webcam via veodia.com straight into Second Life. I’ve set it up for a presentation to New Zealand academic librarians during their conference next week, Libraries of the seven C’s .

Here’s a one minute clip showing the setup. The visual and audio is captured straight from Second Life, no dubbing. Audio and visual were a bit out of sync, but during upload, this was exacerbated. The beautiful auditorium is the work of a Murdoch University student, Mandy Kerr, who has done an amazing redesign of the island.

Here it is on YouTube, Livestreaming video for a presentation in Second Life

And here is on Flickr. Streaming live video Murdoch Uni Island

Interesting that the YouTube clip is more out of sync than the Flickr one.

Here’s how I did it.

Livestreaming

1. Sign up for a free account at veodia.com . Unlike Ustream, Veodia output can be played in Quicktime, which is the format Second Life needs.

2. Check your upload speed using something like speedtest.net . Veodia requires an upload speed of 500+ kbps . Mine is around 800, but I think it may dip under 500 every so often, so I cannot stream from home.
3. Switch on your webcam

4. Select “Start new btoadcast”

5. Press “start”

6. The footage is streamed onto a web page, for which you will get a link. This link is the same each time you restart the show.

7. Find the bit of code starting with “rstp”. This changes for each show. This is the code you will need for Second Life.
8. Log in as the island owner.

9. Go to World>About Land > Media.

10. Paste the “rstp” code into the box and select “set”

11. Check in the same window to check what is set as the “default media texture”. If you have not changed it, then it should be kind of grey.

12. Create a simple media viewer by creating a cube using building tools. Add the “default media texture” as the texture on the outside of the cube.

13. Ensure that your video preferences are set to automatically play video

14. All should work. I found that veodia streams varied, and sometimes you need to restart several times (and re-paste the rstp) to get it working. I checked in the web page that the show streamed to to see whether it looked flaky.

SuzanneC Baskervilles’s Land Answers for Second Life wiki has a really useful section on streaming media in and out of Second Life . I wish I’d found it before I wrote this post.

Slide viewer

1. Make slides in Powerpoint.

2. Export as jpeg.

3. Resize the slides to at most 512 x 512 pixels. This will make them load quicker. The dimensions mean that SL won’t try to change the dimensions as it uploads. If they are kind of squished, you can always stretch the texture when you put them out to make them the right proportions.

4. Use batch upload as textures to Second Life ( 20 @ 10Lindens each = about 80 cents )

5. Create a square object and squish it to screen size.

6. Grab a premade Slide Viewer scipt from the ICT library on Info Island , or do a bit of searching about to find one you like.

7. In “Edit” mode, drop the script and the images for the slides onto the “contents” tab. The image will change each time it is touched.

I decided I wanted “forward and back” arrows, but didn’t know enough scripting to make them. My clever SL friend, Brian A Corleone, gave me a viewer that was just the ticket, and I used that.

A problem with slide viewers is that it can take ages to download and view each slide. Brian gave me a tip. Create objects with textures the same as the slides and place them near the viewer. They can be teeny tiny. This forces the viewers’ PC to download and cache the textures, so that it doesn’t do a fresh download when the slide is displayed.

Making the video clip

1. Download FRAPs to capture the audio and visual. If you want to record for unrestricted time without a watermark, you can buy it for AUD47.

2. Set Second Life and FRAPS running. Use the record video hotkey to switch it on to start, and off to finish

3. FRAPS records a huge .avi , which can only be played by someone who has FRAPS on their machine, so you need to convert it before it can be uploaded

4. Download Virtual Dub to do the conversion .

5. Go to DivX to download their codec. This tells Virtual Dub how to compress the clip so it can be played on many players.

6. Open Virtual Dub and chose Video>Convert. Select the DivX encoder

7. Go to Tools > Filter and use “add” to select a “resize” filter. Play around to find a way that you like to get the clip to a 4:3 ratio. This may be by cropping or letterboxing. YouTube clips are 320 x 240 pixels, so you may like to set the size to this.

8. There is no step 8. Tell me in the comments if you actually have read this. Instructions are usually so boooooring that you just skim through to find the bit you need. As it should be.

9. Go to File > Save as .avi. It should start churning away.

10. Go to the directory and find the clip. Upload to YouTube or wherever.

11. Rest.

UPDATE 28 JANUARY 2008:

It seems that veodia.com no longer offers free accounts. Instead, what they offer now is a free trial for 24-hours. Furthermore, when I tried the trial, I did not see anything about broadcasting… Kinda looks like they switched the whole thing to a pre-recorded format. So, quick heads up to anyone following this route, it is certainly not free anymore, and it may not even work at all.