Synchronized playback is somewhere on the "to do" list.
As for client side requiring support for the media format... The alternative is turn everything into a "known" format on the server side...(transcoding?) which is just takes too much server resources... and introduces a bunch of other issues... In a linux thin client environment distributing new codecs or update to existing codecs is not a big deal.. As for clients running as an application on traditional desktops, we may integrate some form of codec distribution system.
mTelePlayer certainly not a 100% perfect solution, but I dare say its a pretty decent step up from the current state of things... The reason we started working on this particular solution is simply because in our opinion media playback was the the only thing left where MS RDP could consistently beat open source solutions. I'd really love to know how Telekinesis and mTelePlayer stacks up against the MS RDP video stuff...
Though resizing and moving the GUI window works pretty good. Due to the nature of being spread over two separate systems, some things simply wont be 100% as perfect as your average "normal" player.
Recent studies done by the "GIOCS" (Global Institute of Obvious and Common Sense) show that the average user care more about the quality of media playback than the appearance of the GUI.
But we have and are still putting a lot of effort into making the mTelePlayer user experience feel right and "natural" (for lack of a better word).
-GZNGET
On 03/18/2014 06:50 PM, Les Mikesell wrote:
On Tue, Mar 18, 2014 at 12:30 PM, GZ Nianguan E.T. <opensource@gznianguan.com> wrote:
Depending on your tolerance, you'd may be fine with one or two users playing back small low res videos... and get somewhat viewable results. Though on a server with 40-50+ users that simply is not going to be fun...
I've always thought there should be a special-case handler for many thin-clients watching the same video in sync (like a classroom) where the server would multicast the stream to a client-local player. Might be good for multi-room music or videos too.
With the Telekinesis approach... mTelePlayer directs your media "untouched" to the client side.... where a mplayer (or even VLC) instance, controlled through telekinesis is doing the actual playback with full HW acceleration
That sounds good, but will depend on the client-side player handling every format you need. That's a common issue with the similar DLNA concept since the standard doesn't actually require it.
The original intended use for Telekinesis and mTelePlayer was to provide good video playback on our X2Go centric thin client hardware (HW still under development). But it has kind of grown past that... And even though the thin client is primarily intended for boring stuff like offices and edu... With the media performances we're seeing... Its should also work quite well as a thin media client in your living room.
The basic concept of Telekinesis & mTelePlayer is quite simple and proof of concept code was written up quite fast, but getting it to work as you'd expect a media player to work and making it "consumer ready" has been and still continues to be quite the journey...
Even vlc seems kind of clunky in the user interface department.