Jazz let me know she had set the parcel media to permit me to edit it. So I re-watched the video tutorial on how to set up streaming YouTube videos on parcel media, and made myself a nice big prim ...
... a nice big nonfunctioning prim, as it were. I couldn't figure out why. I was doing everything right. The parcel was detecting the movie. The default media texture was being used on both the parcel media setting and the prim setting. The movie was playing, apparently, somewhere. But the screen stayed blank and gray.
I experimented with still images, and with my web site. Duh! The screen "saw" those things and presented them. but whenever I went back to the movie, regardless of whether I tried streaming it from YouTube or from my own streaming web server ...
... I once again got only the gray screen. This was most disconcerting. I found it necessary to take a break and do some seriously deep thinking.
I had no revelations during my seriously deep thinking (although I did achieve dramatic improvement in my tan). So I decided to do what all geeks do when faced with this sort of problem. Namely, I rebooted and started over.
This time, I decided to build in my bedroom rather than annoy the neighbor with a huge noisy (potentially) prim next to her house. I followed the same steps, and constructed the same, although significantly smaller, media screen. I repeated the steps for getting the video URL from YouTube, and pasted that setting into the parcel media controls. The same, exact procedure only this time ...
... I got a different result. Now that's interesting. Not precisely what I was after, but much better than the unseeing gray screen. A few tweaks here and there on the prim settings and
Voila! This was even closer to what I was after. A couple of clicks around (I really don't quite remember what I did, to tell you the truth), and suddenly ...
Could it be? There were telltale sounds coming out of the speakers, something different was happening ...
Houston! We have lift-off! Woot!
Of course, all this success--disregarding the fact that I'm not 100% sure how I managed to obtain it--made me wildly confident and greedy for more. Completely disregarding my earlier concern for the neighbor, I decided to make Mr. Media Screen very fat and push him through the wall, so that the video would play both inside the house and outside it.
Voila, again. In the early phases of the video, it looks just like another window with the privacy blinds on. But, give it a few minutes and ...
Oh, now that's nifty.
Flush with success, I pose with my creation. Now what?
First of all, I shut the movie player off and made the screen transparent, so the neighbor won't be besieiged with video and noise until the night I finally have my party ... and hopefully she'll be AT the party and won't care at that point. Additionally, I won't be besieiged with ugliness in my own bedroom--I wound up using a particularly hideous wallpaper texture for the media texture, just in case there was something else somewhere on my parcel that was dutifully playing my video entirely by accident. So this first little foray into the intersection of RL/SL art feels pretty comfy. But if I plan the party right, it will be quite an event and may even be worthy of a little machinima. Oh yeah.
XOX,
Asimia
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