miércoles, 19 de diciembre de 2007

vídeo en SL

Para unir más la realidad y la virtualidad, ¿que mejor que la retransmisión de vídeo en directo en SL? de esta manera se amplían las posibilidades a la hora de retransmitir eventos sociales y congregar a un mayor número de personas. 

el artículo en inglés:

First test - webcasting from Second Life

Live webcasting from Second Life will be a killer application: it will permit distributing live video coverage of events in Second Life also to the majority of Web users who are not Second Life users, to those without PCs with sufficient power to run Second Life, and to SL users away from their computers. If the format is compatible with QuickTime, live webcasting from Second Life also permits distributing live video coverage of events in Second Life to other locations in Second Life. Showing Second Life live events on the web, to thousands (or even much more, depending on the streaming servers used) of persons besides the more or less 100 avatars that can fit in a sim, will also permit answering to one of the most common question of marketers.


This is a screenshot of my first experiment, (started as a proof-of-concept for a client): In the picture, Sophrosyne Stenvaag and I are watching ourselves broadcast live in Second Life, with a delay of a few seconds. See also this video on blip.tv.

Setup used: QuickTime Broadcaster (Mac only), CamTwist (Mac only), Darwin Streaming Server 5.5.5 running on a Linux server, IShowU (Mac only) to record the video offline, and of course the Second Life client. Workflow: CamTwist defines a resizable desktop area as a new video source fro QuickTime Broadcaster - QuickTime Broadcaster streams to the Darwin Streaming Server, which in turn streams to the web. The stream url (RTSP) can be used as media url in Second Life.

Settings used: a small broadcasting area on the screen and a small Second Life window (see the video, 480x360 pixels). In QuickTime Broadcaster: Source CamTwist, width 300x225 pixels (I got an error with larger sizes) compression H264, 16 frames per second, key frame every 48 frames, limit data rate 240 kbits/sec. I will contact the author of CamTwist to find out how to do better. Due to these low quality settings I did not record the movie on disk with QuickTime Broadcaster, but used the separate applications IShowU. Even if my Mac is quite good (MacBook Pro 17 inches, 2.33 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM), having all these programs running in parallel decreases the performance a lot. Without recording on disk, the performance is almost acceptable for live webcasting. I will do more experiments and set up an operational system.

Of course this technique does not only work for Second Life, but permits webcasting whatever happens on the desktop.

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