[Spice-devel] Streaming video performance concepts

[John A. Sullivan III]

On Thu, 2011-06-23 at 10:50 +0300, Yaniv Kaul wrote:
> We could throw many more into the thread.
> When comparing video encodings, we must take into account:
> - speed of encoding (many of the encoders are not fast enough for real 
> time, they may decode fast, but we need fast encoding too)
> - quality (and how to measure it - see 
> http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/472 )
> - features, flexibility, license, active development community, ...
> 
> This is really not an easy task and there's probably not a one-fit-all 
> solution to it. Here's an example for some comparison - 
> http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/102
> 
> Also, just a thought - say we do Flash pass-through (from guest to 
> client), have we solved perhaps solved 90% of the problem in real-world 
> usage?
> Y.
> 
> On 06/23/2011 09:13 AM, Attila Sukosd wrote:
> > How about WebM?
> > http://www.webmproject.org/
> >
<snip>
Interesting thoughts and thank you all for running with this topic.

In our case, we are pressed for time and need to go to market with
something - we are taking quite a leap to even think about going with
SPICE being so new but we really are intrigued.  To get us there faster,
we are thinking about mashing up X2Go and SPICE.  Where video is
sufficient with MJPEG, users can play video normally and, where it does
not, we can use the X2Go proposed "localMediaPlayer" which will copy the
file to the physical device and use its native media player.  Choices
and functionality which (almost) works today.

However, I'm not sure what we will do with embedded video like YouTube,
or news sites.  Flash pass through sounds interesting.  The big question
I would have is portability for two reasons - strange to pass flash just
when we are at the advent of HTML5.

More importantly, what is this portable across a huge variety of end
points? In our business model, we are focusing on trying to keep content
creation and content consumption in the same place and accessible in the
cloud.  For example, I want to be able to create a slideshow or video
from my PC on my SPICE desktop in the cloud and then be able to view
that slideshow or video on my SPICE desktop from my cousin's Droid or
iPad (I know those clients don't exist YET).  That's why SPICE is so
important to us and why we'd like to see any solution to the problem be
highly portable.

Thoughts? Comments? Insults?

Oh, by the way, I think WebM is a container which uses VP8 rather than
an actual codec - John