What video streaming protocols/formats does Shared Media actually support?

[Paris Shilton]

What actual formats are supported by shared media? Goal is to stream via VLC to either parcel media or shared media (on a prim), but having little luck. Unfortunately the Second Life wiki still, after four years, refers to the defunct QuickTime. 

[Lillith Hapmouche]

Just a random thought: wouldn't it be possible to create a WatchTogether room, put that URL as your media on the parcel and stream that way?

[Phate Shepherd]

Long ago, streaming video into SL used Quicktime streaming format that could be streamed from Quicktime Broadcaster to Quicktime Streaming Server. Even if that still works, Quicktime has been deprecated on Windows 10.... So you are very unlikely to have visitors that still have a working installation.

MoaP solutions have their own problems... since everyone gets their own instance of the web page (not a shared instance) you don't see what everyone else does unless it is of a streamed source, like Youtube Live or Twitch, etc. You also have to make sure everyone has MoaP turned on in their viewer to see it.

Watching a movie and having it at the same point for everyone used to be possible with Rabbit for a few different services, but that service is gone.

[Qie Niangao]

Not sure where to find a comprehensive list of supported formats (and no hint what VLC might be able to generate -- I've only ever used it to watch streaming playback), but just be advised that all this changed significantly a little over a month ago, with the new CEF update in the Linden viewer (and now some Third Party Viewers) supporting embedded mp4 as used by the proprietary Vimeo embedded player. My point is only that you should be sure you're using a viewer with this update when trying to test stuff. (I've seen reports that the CEF update has some quirks handling certain web pages, though, so it's possible some TPVs have delayed adoption, not sure.)

[EDIT: well, that Vimeo thing was an obscure reference, even by my standards. The roots go back to supporting the Adult Swim event in May.]

Edited August 3, 2020 by Qie Niangao

[extremedigital1952]

yes it would seem to be true because it can be done with Netflix and YOUTUBE i know cause my son does it in his SL home and has movie nights

 

[Ardy Lay]

Dunno.  Hit Ctrl Alt Shift Z and go browsing?

Edited August 3, 2020 by Ardy Lay

[Tomos Halsey]

Sorry for the necro bump but I too was looking for this information, since the wiki is old and out of date and nobody seems to know I figured the only way to find out this information was to dig through the source code of the viewer directly and paste the results.

TL;DR: Any content mimetype that gets handled by the "web" widget type in the table below will get piped through to cef or webkit plugins, they will dictate the limitations of what the viewer can generate through Shared Media so you could probably load up https://caniuse.com/ and check on a prim in world.


LONG Version

To start lets head on over to the repo at https://bitbucket.org/lindenlab/viewer/src/master/ and this is where we will be looking for clues.
Glancing into the 'viewer/indra/media_plugins' folder there is a base plugin other things can inherit, the cef(chromium embedded framework) plugin for prim media, a gstreamer010 / libvlc plugin for handling the Parcel Media per platform. These are going to be the available plugins the viewer can use for handling media requests via mimetype mapping through 'viewer/indra/newview/llmimetypes.cpp'.

If we take a look at 'viewer/indra/newview/llmimetypes.h' a comment indicates that an XML file is loaded with the lookup information for each mime type the viewer can recognize somewhere in the viewers 'skins' folder, so off to the skins folder on our local machine!

Searching inside the viewers skins folder you can see that there are many different 'mime_types' XML files scattered throughout each skin(if other skins are present), each language and even per platform (ie: mime_types_mac.xml, mime_types_linux.xml)...this is going to get messy so I will stick with english on windows.

This is the list inside 'skins/default/xui/en/mime_types.xml' on the official Linden Lab SL viewer 6.6.4.575022 (64bit) on a Windows machine.

Mimetype	Plugin	Widget Type
blank	media_plugin_cef	none
none/none	media_plugin_cef	none
audio/*	media_plugin_libvlc	audio
video/*	media_plugin_libvlc	movie
image/*	media_plugin_cef	image
video/vnd.secondlife.qt.legacy	media_plugin_libvlc	movie
application/javascript	media_plugin_cef	web
application/ogg	media_plugin_cef	audio
application/pdf	media_plugin_cef	image
application/postscript	media_plugin_cef	image
application/rtf	media_plugin_cef	image
application/smil	media_plugin_cef	movie
application/xhtml+xml	media_plugin_cef	web
application/x-director	media_plugin_cef	image
audio/mid	media_plugin_cef	audio
audio/mpeg	media_plugin_libvlc	audio
audio/x-aiff	media_plugin_libvlc	audio
audio/x-wav	media_plugin_libvlc	audio
image/bmp	media_plugin_cef	image
image/gif	media_plugin_cef	image
image/jpeg	media_plugin_cef	image
image/png	media_plugin_cef	image
image/svg+xml	media_plugin_cef	image
image/tiff	media_plugin_cef	image
text/html	media_plugin_cef	web
text/plain	media_plugin_cef	text
text/xml	media_plugin_cef	text
video/mpeg	media_plugin_libvlc	movie
video/mp4	media_plugin_libvlc	movie
application/octet-stream	media_plugin_libvlc	movie
video/quicktime	media_plugin_libvlc	movie
video/x-ms-asf	media_plugin_libvlc	movie
video/x-ms-wmv	media_plugin_cef	movie
video/x-msvideo	media_plugin_libvlc	movie

I'd imagine that if someone added a new mapping to this list a new mimetype could be added and piped through the plugins as well (assuming they can handle the datastream).
OH I almost forgot to mention, Shared Media would be the "web" widget type so anything under there should be playable by all Linden viewers.

Edited September 24, 2022 by Tomos Halsey
Corrected to Shared Media not Parcel Media

[sandi Mexicola]

On 8/3/2020 at 11:53 AM, Lillith Hapmouche said:

Just a random thought: wouldn't it be possible to create a WatchTogether room, put that URL as your media on the parcel and stream that way?

yes, it is  

well, sort of. (I haven't tried live-streaming videos)

Streaming videos so that everyone sees the same thing at (roughly) the same time is a little tricky though.  The way I do it is get everyone there, make sure they have the proper media settings in their SL Viewers, then I  rez the thing that shows the videos.  If everybody is there together, it seems to work OK, even if I switch videos.  But if someone comes in late, I think they just start seeing the video from the beginning, no matter where rest of us are at in the video.  

Edited September 23, 2022 by sandi Mexicola

[sandi Mexicola]

On 8/3/2020 at 12:04 PM, extremedigital1952 said:

yes it would seem to be true because it can be done with Netflix and YOUTUBE i know cause my son does it in his SL home and has movie nights

he must teach us his secrets! 

[bigmoe Whitfield]

12 hours ago, sandi Mexicola said:

he must teach us his secrets! 

yes because netflix uses a cookie based session and only allows login for that cookie and session, it's not a shared experience.   we've tried several methods and they fail.  Only way we can get it to work is using a server that lets us use obs to stream netflix, but that requires upload and download bandwidth and not many people have that head room to do so.

[Love Zhaoying]

On 8/3/2020 at 12:04 PM, extremedigital1952 said:

yes it would seem to be true because it can be done with Netflix and YOUTUBE i know cause my son does it in his SL home and has movie nights

 

Do you use a "watch together" mode in Netflix and YouTube? That would probably work, since it's designed for that..

[bigmoe Whitfield]

8 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Do you use a "watch together" mode in Netflix and YouTube? That would probably work, since it's designed for that..

it kinda works, both have to have accounts for netflix though, youtube maybe might work without an account.