Hi again,
It should not be a big ordeal to make use of VLC but first we would like to iron out the kinks on the mplayer based implementation first.
If you started media playback in your X2Go session today... and open something like "top" or another system monitor... You'd see not only does the media player consume a massive chunk of your CPU but a couple X2Go related processes goes nuts too and your audio quite possibly would be randomly out of sync. 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... And of-course since the the client don't know any better... It wont give you hardware acceleration on the clientside either... so your client will get bogged down too.... So you basically have a bunch of overworked processes of either side (client and server) thats inhibiting you from getting an enjoyable viewing experience...
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 (if you got the HW for it) and surround sound (if you got the HW for that too). So even when playing high quality 1080p media, you'd get flawless audio and visual performance (as long as your client hardware can actually handle that). And while you're playing the 1080p video.... On the server side you probably wont spot mTelePlayer in "top".... you'll probably see CPU hogs like lxpanel and xfce4-panel using a lot more CPU.
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...
We've spent quite a bit of time on testing which path provides the highest level of performance and uses the least amount of server side resources. While at the same time, for the end user... just simply be and function the way you'd expect a media player to be... So I certainly hope some of you will find it useful.
Anyway I should wrap this up before it turns into a book....
-GZNGET
On 03/18/2014 04:34 PM, Les Mikesell wrote:
On Tue, Mar 18, 2014 at 6:22 AM, GZ Nianguan E.T. <opensource@gznianguan.com> wrote:
Hi Les.
For your everyday playback that you would normally use a media player for there's the mTelePlayer...
Would there be a way to make it work with vlc? I already trust that to play about anything I throw at it. And how different is the transfer protocol than if you just play a video in the remote X session now?
-- Les Mikesell lesmikesell@gmail.com