I am back!...with a little something to show....

[Tito]

Yea, it's been a few months since I have trolled or posted anything on WBandD. Just been too busy with my day jobs and a few other time hogging problems, but I least I made the effort to drop by again. I must say there's been a lot of cool stuff posted in WBandD on my absence, some of which is way, way beyond my web3d work skills, he, he! Also, I will try to see if I drop by my favorite platform, ABnet and see what Rick and vcard are up to.

Anyway, on my little time off I managed to have on the past few months, I been dabbling a bit with my old "Virtual Half-Life" website, in the sense of re-doing it from the ground up, giving it a fresh look and feel with a new emphasis on content, but above all to bring it up to markup validation XHTML & CSS specs. To be honest, it won't even be called Virtual Half-Life anymore. Once I finish up the updates on my new site, it will replace my current one here.

One other thing I just finished doing, is this little experimental VRML scene I threw together to display some multi-media based content examples like URL linked pictures and embedded, videos. Trying to add pictures and videos to a VRML scene was always something that I wanted to try out for a long time. Well, I finally managed to come up with a working example of a multi-media world. Now, the VRML scene that I put together is only meant to showcase what a web linked poster and an embedded, high quality video will look and sound like, and it's all inside a simple little room with a few textures, that's it.

Well, before I give you the direct link to this world, there's a few things you need to know: Once you enter the world, the mesh and textures will load up fairly quickly, the scene itself is very small. The problem lies with the embedded mpeg video, it is 25 MB in size. What this means is, even if you have a broadband connection, it will still take at least a few minutes for the video to completely load up on your computer's memory cache, and be ready for playing. The moment you enter the room, you will see a large white rectangle to your right, that's the embedded video, to the left of it is the web linked movie poster. At this time, the embedded video on the wall is still "white", do not click on it just yet, it still has not finished loading up. Only then when the movie's white screen turns green, that's when it will be fully loaded up and ready to play. So, once you see the green screen, click on it to start playing the video clip.

Here's the link: Multi-media test world

Here's what it all looks like (the actual video looks a lot better in world that it does on the picture below):

[Tito]

Hey vcard....good to hear from you again. I see you have been a real busy bee with the ABnet interface, it's really looking good now!

[vcard]

Welcome back Tito, we missed you ;-)

[Tito]

Well, I am sure there are some free web hosting sites that offer "streaming options" on their packages, it's just of matter of looking for them. Anyway, I just updated this example world by replacing that mpeg 25 MB Legion movie video with another, smaller file size movie clip. This time, it's not mpeg, it's now a WMV clip with a file size of only 6.34 MB. I used the latest Windows Media Encoder to optimize it a bit for web delivery. At only about 1/4th the size and same video resolution of the previous embedded video, it should load up a lot quicker this time around.

[Steve]

nice video Tito. :)
It is a shame that there still isnt alot of support for mpeg4 video. they are awesome quality and a fraction of the file size. I tried uploading a couple to wband but this format wont accept them. but contact does have a function for streaming video. I have yet to try it though since i dont have a streaming server lol

Oh and wb btw :)