[Spice-devel] [PATCH v5 00/20] Add GStreamer support for video streams

[Francois Gouget]

On Mon, 31 Aug 2015, Fabio Fantoni wrote:
[...]
> Is possible add to optionally enable streaming on client request instead
> enable/disable on start only spice-server side?

Spice already supports streaming video using its built-in MJPEG encoder. 
That streaming can be disabled/configured using the server-side 
StreamingVideo setting.

This patch series simply makes it possible to widden the supported video 
codecs through the use of GStreamer. As such it is completely 
independent from the mechanism used to decide whether to stream video or 
not. Thus any change to the latter policy should be made as a separate 
patch.


> Also codec selection based on client parameter I think can be good
> instead  check only if is supported.

My take on this is that it's the server which will perform the video 
encoding and the codec that's used will have a big impact on server CPU 
and on bandwidth use (maybe to a lesser extent). So the server 
administrator should have the last say on which codec is best suited to 
his server's server CPU/bandwidth capacity.

That take is probably less relevant outside the context of a virtual 
desktop server but in those cases the user running the client probably 
also controls the machine running the Spice server so he can still pick 
which codec to use.


-- 
Francois Gouget <fgouget at codeweavers.com>