[Bug 36186] New: Video playback with client on host vs client on remote

[bugzilla-daemon at freedesktop.org]

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=36186

           Summary: Video playback with client on host vs client on remote
           Product: Spice
           Version: unspecified
          Platform: x86-64 (AMD64)
        OS/Version: Linux (All)
            Status: NEW
          Severity: normal
          Priority: medium
         Component: client
        AssignedTo: spice-bugs at lists.freedesktop.org
        ReportedBy: gvenkat at attglobal.net


In my latest set up, I am noticing a serious problem in flash playback in a
browser when the guest is displayed on the host itself or from a remote machine
using spice client. The problem occurs with both 0.6 and 0.8 versions (and all
combinations of them) of spice.

When seen from a remote client, the flash playback is very good even in full
screen mode. But when spice client is run on the host itself, the flash video
playback is extremely bad and in full screen mode unusable.

Since there are many. many variables here that could cause this and I am not
sure how kvm, libvirt, spice all play together, I will be happy to provide more
information to anyone who knows which of them could make a difference. 

Some obvious info:

OpenSuSE 11.4 linux on server (64-bit), Ubuntu 10.10 on client (32-bit). Guest
OS is Windows XP with SP3 (32 bit).

I have eliminated poor graphics subsystem as a reason on the host. It has
excellent graphics integrated (i7 2600k cpu, much better than the client which
is an old generation Mac Mini) and the host is not even close to being loaded
in CPU. Looking at the same video on the host using VNC shows typical VNC
problems but usable (without audio) but the SPICE version is really bad. It is
just the opposite when the very same session is switched to the client (simply
by starting the client on the remote which drops the local spice client and
continues playing the video on the desktop). The VNC version is inadequate on
the remote as we all know but the SPICE version is very usable. This seems very
strange and I am trying to figure out where the bottleneck is when spice client
is local. Audio works fine in both cases.

Has anyone else done this experiment of running the same video with host local
and remote invocations of the spice client to see if there is a significant
difference? If anything, I would have expected better performance locally than
at the remote.

Other info: This problem is much less with HTML5 videos it seems but I am not
sure this problem is with Flash.

I am hoping that this is some configuration issue with Spice based on the
different versions of things involved than a design/bug with Spice that gets
triggered running on the host.

Do let me know if there are things I can try and report.

Thanks

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