When putting media in Active Worlds, you will need to use sign objects. Sign5.rwx, xsign1.rwx, and sign4.rwx all work well.
The media command allows you to play videos or radio streams in Active Worlds. If you want to play a movie, be sure you are linking to a video in the correct format. Active Worlds supports the following formats:
.mpeg
.wm
.wma
.mpg
.avi
Formats such as .asx, .wax, .wvx, .wmx, .wpl, .mov, and .wmm will not work. If the video you want to play works in Windows Media Player, then it will work in AW. Windows Media metafiles don't work.
Movies
To create a movie on your sign object, find a URL to one ending in the above formats.
An example of a video URL to use is http://home.graffiti.net/toasterz/DSC00001.AVI (Notice it ends in .AVI)
You will need to put your URL into the sign's action line with the following command:
create sign; activate media url=http://home.graffiti.net/toasterz/DSC00001.AVI
The "create sign" part of this command allows you to place text on the sign telling people who view it what they will be seeing. It works just like a normal sign object, you can even adjust the the colors of the sign (create sign color=black bcolor=white). Any text you want to place on the sign gets put in the description line.
Example:
Now when you click your sign, it activates the media file you want to play. You should see a loading screen appear on your sign similar to the following:
Depending on your internet connection, loading times may differ. If you have high speed internet then it should load fairly quickly. Once the file loads, you will see the text you placed in the sign's description appear at the bottom of the video:
To stop the streaming video at any time, simply click the sign like you did to activate it and it will return to the regular sign view.
You can also make things more complicated:
You can adjust the resolution (res=64, 128, 256, or 512), turn osd on or off (osd=on/off), apply sound effects (fx=3D) and set the radius the media can be heard (radius=50, 25, any other number) as well as how far the video can be viewed with the radoff command (radoff=50, 25, any other number). You can also adjust the volume your video plays at with the vol command (vol=0-100 where 0 is mute and 100 is maximum volume) or have the file open in another window with the ext command (ext=on/off)
Example:
create sign color=red bcolor=white; activate media res=256 osd=on url=mms://wmbcast.nasa-global.speedera.net/wmbcast.nasa-global/wmbcast_nasa-global_jan212004_1021_53608 fx=3d radius=30
Sound
To create streaming media that's not a video, just sound, replace the video URL with that of a radio stream and don't include commands related to videos such as res, osd, or radoff.
Click Here to return to the action line commands pages.