Multiple viewing for TV's in secondlife

[FelicityyRose]

I am not sure if this has been discussed before or not. I have noticed this each time I have decided to purchase a tv for mine and my partners bedroom, or living room. We just recently have gotten a theatre room in our new house. I am wondering ( and hopefully I am not the only one ) why we cannot watch something together on youtube.... and why it only appears viewed for one person! it doesn't make sense for just one person to be seeing what is played. Is there a fix for this or are they making a fix!?

[Qie Niangao]

It's almost unfixable. To make media viewing practical, the video never passes through any SL-related servers, but rather goes from the source (e.g., YouTube's vast server farms and content-delivery networks) directly to the viewer's machine. If those videos ever sync, it's because the viewers initiated them at the same time: "Ready... set... GO!"

Now, mostly theoretically, there are a few ways that could be changed. One is server-side and would re-route a video stream from YouTube and deliver it simultaneously in a stream format to multiple viewers simultaneously, basically turning a playing of those old videos into a live streamed event, and those are viewed simultaneously* on everybody's PC. I can't even begin to imagine how expensive this would be, especially at any significant scale.

Another possibility might work for certain video formats that can be roughly synchronized using stream timestamps. I haven't touched this in ages, but the old parcel media script function includes a parameter that (re-)starts the video at a specified point. In theory, one could script something that sync'd each viewer's experience of the stream individually rather than each starting the stream from the beginning when they connect. Back then, before Media-on-a-Prim (aka Shared Media), when parcel media was common, I found this only worked for a minority of stream formats and on particular viewing platforms (some worked on Linux but not PCs nor Macs, some for PCs but not Linux nor Macs, etc.) but this may have improved now that everybody is using CEF instead of some mostly broken thing of Apple origin that I've since repressed. 

Another might be some javascript in the Shared Media TV that simply arranged for all the viewers to request the video to start at the same time. This could only work if everybody who is to view the video were present for that start and never moved their cam too far from the screen (so the stream doesn't automatically disconnect and have to restart from the beginning). It's "practical" in that it's basically a javascript version of "Ready... set... GO!" -- but impractical in that it's no real improvement either.

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*"Simultaneously" within the bounds of buffering and network delay.

[animats]

SL will now play live streaming video (this is recent). So you can all watch the same live stream. For a while I had a screen at my place which showed a live webcam somewhere in RL.

You can't play content that needs Digital Rights Management in SL, because Google Chromium (the open source version of Chrome and the browser inside the viewer) does not support that. That's intentional on Google's part. (DRM politics - long story.). So, no Netflix group viewing.

You could use a video streaming service to run your own content through a streaming server and back out to users. But video streaming services start around US$40/month and go up from there. Way up. If it weren't so expensive, performers and DJs in SL would do it, because they could have giant screens with close-ups of their own performance.

You could create a web page which, when you loaded it, started a playlist at a specific point. So you could have a Youtube movie show that started at 8 PM, and anyone who started it would get a URL generated with the number of seconds after 8 PM as the starting point, putting them in sync with everyone else. That's ordinary web programming, and not too hard.  Then you have a SL screen that starts from the URL of that web page, and you're in business.  Someone with a movie theater in SL ought to do this. There are theaters in SL, but most don't work.

 

Edited January 22, 2021 by animats

[Wulfie Reanimator]

To try and put it simply:

Your TV is your web browser in the viewer. Only you can see it, just like your real browser.

Only the address of the page is shared with other people, not the content.

It's not possible to fix it.