Bucky Barkley

Introduction

VidMon 3 is the second of three video products offered by my store: Buckaroo.

VidMon gives a selection of videos. Add movies to a notecard, set a backdrop, handle any permissions issues, and enjoy.

Per-Person video means that you and others can watch the same screen independently. You can watch the same, or different videos, at the same time. You can also have multiple screens within a parcel. In short:

• same or different videos
• same or different screens
• same time
• you only see one video at a time

Oh, and you can mirror your screen elsewhere in the same parcel :)

License

VidMon is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Configuring and Using VidMon

1. Add movies to notecard
2. Decide on a screen texture
3. Handle any permissions issues
4. Reset and Enjoy
5. Stop Video
6. Using Menu Items
7. Other Configuration Capabilities
   1. HoverText
   2. Labels
   3. Giving A Folder Of Notes
   4. Giving A Copy Of Your Links

VidMon gives a menu of videos. The menu enables easy browsing and picking from up to 30 videos or so. It is also easy to search for one, based on name or link.

VidMon is configured by editing the “urls” notecard in the inventory of the object.

1. Add movies to notecard

The format for adding videos to VidMon is:

Some Description = http://someaddress

example:

Linking prims = http://vidtuts.s3.amazonaws.com/QUICKTIP-Linking-prims.mp4

Note that the movie must be supported by QuickTime, and play in SL. Do not point at Flash videos. They wont work.

Note: You need to use the address that resolves to the movie.  Pointing at a web page which happens to contain a movie (among many other things) will not work.

2. Decide on a screen texture

The texture you specify for the poster will be the screen for the movie.

You can use whatever you want. Drag it into the inventory and make sure it is named “screen-texture”. You may want to rename the one provided, as a backup.

You should note that any texture you use will become a screen surface anywhere in the parcel.

3. Handle any permissions issues

Try resetting VidMon and click on it. If you are the owner of the land, and it works, you can skip the part about deeding VidMon to a group.

If the video does not play, you may need to deed the object to the group that owns the parcel. Explaining the ins and outs of group membership and deeding is beyond the scope of this document. The gist of it is: you want to set the object to the group that owns the parcel, share it with group, and deed it:

If you are unsure about this step, you should call upon the parcel owner or group admin to help. Do not forget to thank them!

4. Reset and Enjoy

If you have made changes to the description or inventory, reset the object.

Find the video you want, and click the numbered button for it.

Some videos may take a while to load (especially if they are not hinted for streamed playback).

5. Stop Video

When you start a video, you will notice that you get a blue dialog in the upper right corner of your SL client window:

The “[Stop]” button will stop the video and restore the screen texture (also just for you)

6. Using Menu Items

Here is another look at the default menu:

• Help! – give a brief chat reminder
• GiveNotes – if present, will give a folder of any inventory items whose name starts with “NOTE.”
• GiveLinks – if present, will give a copy of the urls file in inventory. This simply provides a means for the user to benefit from your collection of links for some VidMon object. They can certainly see all of your links by searching on a colon ‘:’ — giving them the actual notecard makes it a little easier to dispense the same information
• << Prev and Next >> – these go backwards and forwards in the list of videos
• SearchLinks – Pressing the SearchLinks button gives the user 30 seconds to type in a search term on an open chat channel. The search looks for a match among the web address titles and links. Here is the sample instruction:

We’ll do a chat command to search for videos with “prim”:

/33 prim

And we get:

Note that the user is given instruction on how to go directly to the site via a chat command (one case: “/33 7″)

7. Other Configuration Capabilities

This section goes into more detail about how the configuration notecard (anything that starts with “urls”) can be used. There is also a mention of how the description field can be used to set descriptive text above the screen.

7.1 – Hovertext

There are two means of adding a floating title to the VidMon object:

1. Change the object description
2. Use the titleText option in the urls notecard

Changing the object description looks like this example:

Note that you can use “\n” to display multiple lines of text.

The other means of setting title text is to use the “titleText” option in the urls notecard. That looks like:

titleText = VidMon\nClick For Videos

You also have control over text color, by using “titleColor” to specify the RGB colors:

titleColor = <0,0,255>

Another item you can set is the transparency, via “titleAlpha”:

titleAlpha = 0.9

note that 0 is fully transparent, and 1.0 is opaque. The example is at 90%.

You may not want any floating text. There are a couple of ways of doing away with it:

• Set transparency to 0
• or leave the description blank, and do not use the titleText option

7.2 Labels

The buttons in the dialog can be changed. You may have a different way of saying “Notes!”, or may want to translate entirely. Here is a sample dialog:

Note the top two rows of buttons. They may all be changed.

A sample change in the urls notecard:

buttonNext = Next >>
buttonPrev = << Prev
buttonSearch = Search!
buttonGetLinks = Links!
buttonNotes = Notes!
buttonHelp = Help!

Results in:

The numbered buttons always correspond to a web address above.

7.3 Giving A Folder Of Notes

You can put one or more notecards into inventory, to be given out when the user clicks on “GiveNotes” (or however you label that button via “buttonNotes”).

For each note to be given out, the name should start with “NOTE.”:

NOTE.example
The user will be given a folder containing the note(s). You can control the name of the folder via the “folderName” option in the urls notecard:

folderName = Sample VidMon Notes

7.4 Giving A Copy Of Your Links

Giving out the urls file simply provides a means for the user to benefit from your collection of links for some VidMon object. They can certainly see all of your links by searching on a colon ‘:’ — giving them the actual notecard makes it a little easier to dispense the same information.

To enable this button, put a comment line anywhere in the urls notecard.

# a comment line starts with a hash mark (an octothorpe, or pound sign)