Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Test Run


Leaf Shermer's Video Room, After (I Made the Speakers and Screen)

Written 12 January, 2007

Test Run

I’m doing a test run on my decorating-and-everything-else business with Leaf Shermer, my neighbor.

I’ve not yet told you about my decorating-and-everything-else business, , but don’t worry. I will. The blogs are already in the can.

I only recently met Leaf, and I’m impressed. She bought her property furnished; it included two big boats and a very nice house. She has a nice eye for detail, but was kind enough to accept my offer for some assistance with decorating, free of charge. Call it rehearsal. Call it a test run.

We’re going to set up a media room.

Leaf has given me access to her place while I’m working. I popped over while she was away, rezzed a rectangular prim, made it thin and placed it alongside the wall, and stretched it until it pretty much filled the space between baseboard and ceiling trim. I rezzed another and made it slightly smaller, then texturized the smaller prim so it would like more or less like a TV screen and made the larger screen into a frame. Leaf was offline, so I left her an IM asking her to take a look at it.

She said it was the perfect size.

A Digression on Radio and Television

In Second Life, radio is easy. If you’re a land owner, all you need to do is bring up the About Land menu and click the media tab. Type in a URL of a streaming radio station in the audio box and you have set the stream. A Music button appears on the bottom of your screen, allowing you to start and stop the stream and adjust the volume.

Change the URL, change the station. It’s as simple as that.

Television is almost as easy. There are two additional considerations, however.

First, you need to check the box that allows the video to resize; that way it adjusts to the size of your screen.

Second, your land needs a designated media texture.

That’s easy enough. You simply look through the textures in your inventory until you find the one you want to use, and then select it. From then on, any surface that is set to that texture will function as a television screen.

So if you designate a tight shot of your butt the video texture, that’s where the video will play.

That’s it. You rez a prim and put a texture on it, and you have a television.

So all of those expensive big screen televisions are a scam.

Well, not really, for they generally come with a bunch of URLs and embedded scripts that do the channel changing for you.

Some are accessed by voice, and some by menus.

For radio, I prefer voice access. For video—and this is just a personal preference—I prefer the menus.

So anyway, you don’t really need a fancy television. Rather, you need the script that lives in them.

What you really need is a media player which utilizes the same script.

They’re much cheaper.

/Digression Off

I know just how I want to set up Leaf’s media room. I know where the screen should go, where to put speakers, where to put a wet bar.

I told Leaf I would be ready to put in the screen last night, but for some reason I was having trouble deciding what to do.

I think part of it was because of my difficulty with my Wurlitzers.

At any rate, between my indecision, a surprise appearance by Sweetie (who is on the road but ducked into a Panera with her laptop), and a late-night visit by Rena, I got very little done last night.

Oh, yes I did. I accidentally deleted a portion of the Xubi house.

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