[X2go-dev] X2Go media player for redirected video [was Re: EyeOS]

[John A. Sullivan III]

On Tue, 2011-02-22 at 18:42 -0500, Gerry Reno wrote:
<snip>
> I think they are just giving you a choice of viewing the video as
> embedded or non-embedded.
> 
> Either way it's still playing locally.
<snip>
That really got me to thinking this evening as video is still a big
problem for us.  Every time we present to a school, we hear how
important it is to play videos.  We are potentially looking at a large
PR firm but they are big multimedia users.  So, I got to thinking . . . 

Could we take a page from the X2Go client printing to do something
similar for video? The X2Go printer takes the pdf file and sends it via
sshfs to the local system which then can use the associated PDF reader
to open it.  What if X2GoServer installed a "media player" which did
nothing more than take the video stream and send it to the physical
computer to be played with whatever player the local system has
configured? Doing that with a regular file should be trivial.  I'm not
sure how one does that with a streaming video but I suppose it would be
similar to spooling a print job to a file.  We could popup a dialog box
(perhaps with a progress indicator) saying we are redirecting the video
to the local computer.

The X2Go Client would need another checkbox to activate redirection of
video to local computer.  If checked, the client would activate a script
on the X2Go server via ssh which would backup the existing mime-type
associations and edit the association files to make the X2Go media
player (spooler might be a better term) the default player for the
appropriate mime-types for the specific user.  When a session is
suspended or terminated, the original mime-types associations are
restored.

Browsers might be a bit of a challenge if they are not using default
applications for video but we could always edit the rdf files for
Firefox (not sure what Chrome uses).

I have a pretty good handle on how mime-type associations are set for
KDE, Gnome, and Trinity as well as Firefox and would be willing to
determine what those edits need to be if someone else could do the X2Go
Client code changes, the X2Go Server script to implement the edits, and
the X2Go media spooler itself.  Does this sound possible? Thanks - John