[MPlayer-users] OT Re: Using mplayer with NX

[RC]

On Mon, 09 Jun 2008 13:52:04 -0400
"John A. Sullivan III" <jsullivan at opensourcedevel.com> wrote:

> Thanks for the input.  The difficulty is not mplayer; we are simply
> using it for testing the concept.  

Well, it's nice to know your problem has nothing at all to do with the
mailing list on which you've asked about it...

> The video-conferencing application lives on the virtual desktop in the
> data center.  The bottom line challenge is how we get video input from
> the physical device (thin client, laptop, netbook, who knows - maybe
> even a cell phone) to the application running on the virtual desktop.
> The video output is then sent to other video conferencing applications
> (many of which will be running on the same virtual desktop host) as
> well as the originating NX client.

Same problems, same solution.  Sending uncompressed (or poorly
compressed) video over the network to the server, only to have it
compressed and decompressed there, then sending the video output
uncompressed over the network to the thin clients, is an absolutely
brutal waste of network resources...  Not to mention CPU resources, as
NX is at least going to do significant (yet futile) processing in an
attempt to compress the video.  You're basically trying to do
uncompressed videoconferencing between the thin-client and server, then
having the server doing actual, (compressed) video conferencing with
other clients, many of whom may presumably be doing exactly the same
two-step process.

Having the videoconferencing application running locally, compressing
the video feed from the webcam before sending it over the network to
the conferencing server, and decompressing the video from other
clients as sent from the conferencing server, would save untold
amounts of network traffic and drastic CPU processing time.

> Perhaps, my instincts are wrong but I've spent much of my career doing
> mid term IT strategy and I see this as a serious issue in the next
> three years as video becomes an ever more important mode of
> information exchange - John

I have no doubt video will become more important in the years to come. 
The solution, however, seems positively trivial...  It just doesn't
happen to fit cleanly into your strict thin-client/server mentality.