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

[Gerry Reno]

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
>
>   

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.

Maybe when the entire world has 1Gbps internet but otherwise just
configure things for a local media player.

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.



Regards,
Gerry