I have been both acquiring a creating some help mkaterials for the new users of our Comenious project, generally in the form of help panels that have been placed into a small tutorial building on the sim. While these are fine, I did particularly want to get some video tutorials together. If you have yet on try this approach then let me recommend CamStudio as an easy to use screen capture desktop application, it comes with a number really useful and uncluttered features. The output files from CamStudio can be either avi of swf format, I used the avi format and then converted them into mov format, which you will need for OpenSim using the convertfiles.com websites, easy to use and did the job no problem.The process of playing media in OpenSim is described on this page and it includes a Freeview script.
The script makes use of a notecard called bookmarks. It was when I was running the script for the first time that I recognised the dialog from a media viewer I had downloaded some time ago in Second Life. The thing is that the content of the bookmark notecard does have to be in a particular format namely: -
video descriptionurl
Examples
Prim Basicshttp://cd.bromley.ac.uk/bteccourses/video/build1.mov
Editing Clotheshttp://cd.bromley.ac.uk/bteccourses/video/editclothes.mov
Please feel free to copy the url's into a web browser if you would like to see the content.
The vertical bar if you have difficulty finding it, can be produced by holding down the Alt key and typing 124 on the numeric keypad then releasing.
From the screen shot you can see that the actual image is sandwiched between two signs saying Touch for Menu. In fact these are two surface of a cube that has been tapered, and between them the surface that plays the video. I did this because when I tried the video player with a viewer that supported Shared Media, I seemed to loose the Script Touch event for the dialog on the screen surface, it seems to work though.
I have a new student project underway, and will be posting on that shortly so please stay in touch for something a little different.
Vega
