Need help streaming video content on parcel - old method not working

[Nebulosus Severine]

It has been awhile for me since I last attempted to stream video content on my land, and the method I was used to using seems to not work anymore: Set an .mp4 url on the Media tab on About Land, apply a texture to the parcel and the same to a prim, and then pressing play on media should work, right? Not anymore. The object just turns white when I press play. What happened, and how do I fix this? I have an art event happening soon and this is a big part of it.

I know there is the alternate "web on a prim" method as well, but unless it allows for full screen video, no ads, owner-only control, and ability to loop, I don't want to deal with it. I would be willing to purchase a script or premade device that would fit those parameters. Can anyone help?

[Qie Niangao]

It may not make any difference to use MoaP ("Shared Media") instead of parcel media (although I don't see a big scripting hurdle). Have you tried your mp4 with prim media manually?

For me, this mp4 works fine as parcel media: https://archive.org/download/DuckandC1951/DuckandC1951_512kb.mp4 so maybe see if that video also works in your viewer, to try to narrow the search for what's going wrong.

[EDIT: Hmm. Actually, it may matter whether it's prim or parcel media. There's another version of that video on archive.org that works fine on MoaP but mostly fails on parcel media for me, even though both playback surfaces must be using the same CEF functionality. No idea what's going on there, but maybe it's obvious to somebody else; may need a jira, preferably from somebody more up-to-speed on the current media playback feature.]

Edited October 14, 2021 by Qie Niangao

[Nebulosus Severine]

8 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

For me, this mp4 works fine as parcel media: https://archive.org/download/DuckandC1951/DuckandC1951_512kb.mp4 so maybe see if that video also works in your viewer, to try to narrow the search for what's going wrong.

I tried that link and it works on my land! So I wonder if the file I'm using is just too large or too long to work properly - it's about 250 MB.

[Qie Niangao]

15 hours ago, Nebulosus Severine said:

I tried that link and it works on my land! So I wonder if the file I'm using is just too large or too long to work properly - it's about 250 MB.

I suspect it's due to the 512KB bitrate, more than the total size of the file. I found a "512KB" version that plays but at 91.7 MB is even larger than other non-512KB MPEGs that failed.

Also, after I tried to put together a little shared media script to play the version of the video that I said would play on MoaP and not parcel media, I couldn't replicate that at all: that larger mp4 wouldn't play on a shared media prim either, regardless how I tried, so I guess I just didn't test the version I thought I was testing. Sorry for that mistake.

I notice that when I try to play the videos streaming from the archive.org page in my browser, the "512KB" version plays with video, the other ones seem to try and then revert to an audio stream. Then I downloaded to my desktop a big (164.1 MB) "HIRES MPEG4" and tried playing it directly from desktop to the browser (not streamed from the website, which already failed) and again it wouldn't work, although it played fine in the Windows "Films & TV" app. This suggests the limitation is inside the Chromium Embedded Framework rather than being specific to SL.