Second Life, aka Secondlife & video sound

[LewRockwellFAN]

Anybody know why I should be getting sound on the music channel just fine but not on the video channel? As far as I know, all the sounds are working correctly except I get no sound with videos. I checked the volume dohickus and the video channel is turned all the way up.

[chickaroo]

IIRC the videos stream using quicktime or something. so, maybe codecs would be a good place to look for solutions.

also, have you tried running Second Life from a terminal, and reading the output? it might give you some more insight into whats going on. or post it here if you can't make sense of it

Edit: I just realized this post is 10 days old, if you found a solution already, it could help others if you post it. thanks

[LewRockwellFAN]

Thanks, Chickaroo. Yes, SL used to use QT for ALL video. Recently things have grown more complicated. I think I have all the relevant codecs. I have no problem getting the same videos to play directly from their source urls in Fire Fox but when I put them on my land video channel Windows and Mac users see them ok but none of the linux users I've spoken with do. I can see them ok with W2k in either the official client or Emerald. The fact it seems to be a problem common to many users on the linux clients, most of whom are probably running Ubuntu or Slackware and the fact it is a problem not unique to the official LL client but also in the linux version of the Snowglobe fork Emerald are the only new data I can add at this point. I'll continue to poke at this as time permits. I'll post back when I can add more info. If anyone has run SL under Sabayon (or ANY linux for that manner) and can state with confidence that video sound ran fine for them I'd love to hear about it and know their system specs. There is a thread on this in one of the Ubuntu forums but ironically I can't get SL of any sort to run under Ubuntu. That's a good idea about inspecting the terminal output. I'll holler later.

[chickaroo]

Hey, Thanks for reporting back, LewRockwellFAN. I honestly haven't played Second Life on Linux in a number of years, mostly on windows. But I do plan on getting back into it whenever I get some time.

It sounds to me like the Linux client is missing features or something. that would be really disappointing if it's true. I'll investigate the issue too when I get time to play again.

Let me know if you find anything more!

[chickaroo]

by the way, there's a very nice overlay here with a lot of 3rd party clients (and even a better version of the official client). maybe some of these will work better than the standard one in portage (which seems to be lacking some features)

also seems to have patches or something for working media streaming. i'm about to try the Emerald client, it seems to be what all the cool kids are using nowadays lol

http://gentoo.techwolf.net/

Primary puporse is for Secondlife with the following added.
Working streaming media on 64-bit systems.
Working vivox on 64-bit builds
Spacenav 3D joystick support.
Many build fixes, no more stupid gcc errors that prevent builds.
Some pjira bugfix patches.
Some pjira feature add patches.
A few third party patches that are usefull to the everyday user while not interfering with the existing User Interface. IE:One can not or turn off the feature withen the client.

The secondlife package provide by portage differs from this overlay:
No voice support in the portage provided ebuild.
No USE flags support for vivox, openal, llmozlib, gstreamer, fmod, or dbus in the portage provided ebuild
Joystick INTENTELLY disabled in the portage provided ebuild. This includes all joysticks, including the spacenav 3D joystick.
The ebuilds in this overlay provide full joystick support, voice support, USE flag support.
Optional USE flags

openal: Enable the openal soft sound system, default on
vivox: Enable the voice support. This binary requires some 32-bit libs on 64-bit system. The 64-bit build of the Secondlife can use the 32-bit vivox binarys. Default on
fmod: Enable the fmod sound support, default off
llwebkit: Enable the qt-webkit support. This is required for some of the newer stuff from LL. Default off is this USE flag is visiable.
llmozlib: Enable the llmozlib support. Disabling this may reduce some search functions withen the Secondlife client. Default on
dbus: Enable or disable the dbus