CyberTech News

It always lifts spirits to listen to good music while building your virtual world. It is easy to play web based MP3-files using XSPF track lists. 

Screenshot of the player in action.

Before we continue, let me introduce Rex Ping. He is the new realXtend based virtual superhero and from now on he will guide you through all the mini tutorials. He is on trial for now at CTN. Here are some pictures of him:

Rex has more muscle power than brains, but hey, virtual stuff can get heavy for a virtual guy.

Rex: “Hey, nice to meet you all. Jani, just go on and write the instructions. I have things to do, but I’ll come back for the screenshot…”.

Oh well, maybe I will get someone with more brains next time. But back to the MP3:

To get your music to play, do this:

1. upload your music to web (I can webhost your small demos, ask jpirkola@gmail.com)
2. make a xspf playlist and upload it to web (example xspf)
3. get web musicplayer from http://musicplayer.sourceforge.net, upload swf file to web
4. upload a new texture to realXtend server (get a blank server here) and apply it to a new prim
5. edit texture properties, set it to refresh once per second
6. set the mediaURL to point to musicplayer swf and set the other parameters as in the example below

http://www.cybertechnews.org/musicplayer/xspf_player.swf?playlist_url=metal.xspf&autoplay=true&repeat_playlist=true

You can take a look and take the files from http://www.cybertechnews.org/musicplayer/

The played music will be heard evenly, so it is not spatialized. It also plays in full volume and there is no way to affect that, except editing the mp3-files… The player can be embedded to a web page, and it is ideally used with webscreen. 

See more about playing media in realXtend:

Browse the web together in realXtend
Show your slides in realXtend: The easy way 
Watch YouTube videos from realXtend

realXtend flash, hosting, howto, media, mp3, music, realxtend 0.4, swf, webscreen, www, xspf

In the previous slideshow howto article, the process of bringing a powerpoint slideshow to a realXtend virtual world was explained. The process was, although technically sound in many ways, also a bit cumbersome.

There is an easier way, especially if your slides are not top secret. 

In the picture above you can see the result. I am taking advantage of the webscreen I presented in an earlier article - Browse the web together in realXtend. 

The process is simple. Upload the slides to http://www.slideshare.net on your account. You get a URL for every slideshow. To protect your slides from public viewing, it is possible to define slideshows private, and you can get a URL for them too. 

Now use that URL with the webscreen or as a texture MediaURL to show the first slide of the presentation inside a realXtend world. Now there is one problem to overcome – there is a lot of stuff that does not belong to the slide, just like with Youtube videos (check also previous article Watch YouTube videos from realXtend). Now it is time to use slide offset and repeat -properties to show only the slide portion of the web page. Take a look at this picture to see the exact settings you need to do. As a sidenote, this works with Youtube as well.

To change the slide, you need to append slash + slide number at the end of the URL. Look at the first screenshot to see an example. This can be done using the webscreen, or simply manually changing the MediaURL.

realXtend powerpoint, realxtend 0.4, RL control, slides, textures, video, webcast, webscreen, www, youtube