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

[John A. Sullivan III]

On Tue, 2011-02-22 at 21:09 -0500, Gerry Reno wrote:
> On 02/22/2011 08:55 PM, John A. Sullivan III wrote:
> > 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
> >
> >   
> 
Yes and no.  I'll respond below.

> We just tell clients that if they want really good video performance
> then their users will need to use a local media player on their client
> machine to play video.
> 
> There's really no good solution to be able to do this from a media
> player on the remote desktop that delivers any type of acceptable
> performance.
I agree with this as long as we are using NX.
> 
> Maybe when the entire world has 1Gbps internet but otherwise just
> configure things for a local media player.
I agree with this, too.  That's the idea of my post.
> 
> And rather than trying to pass the actual content around it's just seems
> easier to post the content on a webserver that the users can access from
> their client machines.
This is where I disagree.  When we have control of the content and
environment that works.  But that's not our environment.  We want as
seamless a user experience as possible whether they are browsing the
Internet and hit a video, clicking on an email attachment that happens
to be video, or viewing some kind of embedded video content.  We expect
our clients to be able to work as closely as possible to their physical
environment in their virtual environment.  The onus is on us to make
that possible as transparently as possible without changing their
procedures.  That may not be true of all deployments but it is true of
ours - John
<snip>