LTSP 4.1 Announced

Socrate76 writes "Linux Terminal Server Project just announced the latest 4.1 version. Among new features: local CD-ROM and floppy support using supermount and samba, sound support with esd and nasd by default, new kernel based on 2.4.26. And a question for other ./-ers: is it possible to watch movies (mplayer | xine) using LTSP over a 100-BaseT Ethernet? Is that possible, or must the movie player be run locally?"

quite possible

[dmatrix7]

I have been testing LTSP 4.1 beta now for a month or so over 100mbit switches. When using esd mplayer plays video just fine but audio does get out of sync. When using nasd it seems a bit better. Watching high res videos over 100mbit does use a lot of bandwidth though. Even playing ogg with xmms+esd uses about 3mbit of bandwidth, depending on your music quality.

Run locally

[Craig Ringer]

Right now, you'd proably want to run locally. This isn't a limitation of LTSP as such, but of the X11 protocol as it now stands. Better protocol compression, or the use of something like <a href="http://www.mediaapplicationserver.net/">
MA S</a> will hopefully help in future.

Low res video should be fine. We do fine here displaying even quite complex flash in browsers over 10/100 ... to Pentium 100 clients. I wouldn't try to watch a DVD, though.

The only way to find out for sure is test it. If you have both a laptop and a desktop, enable XDMCP on the desktop then connect with the laptop (X -query $DESKTOP_HOSTNAME when X is not already running; make sure there's no firewall on either host). Log in and try playing some video to see how you go.

The easiest way to get decent performance will definitely be to run the player as a local app on the client. LTSP has good support for this sort of thing, thankfully.

You might also want to search the LTSP mailing list archives.

--
Craig Ringer

Yes, but no.

[stienman]

It's possible, but not practical. Sending an compressed DVD quality stream takes up a large fraction of a 100mbit connection. Sending an uncompressed stream would be significantly worse.

-Adam

Remote movie playing

[0x0d0a]

And a question for other ./-ers: is it possible to watch movies (mplayer | xine) using LTSP over a 100-BaseT Ethernet? Is that possible, or must the movie player be run locally?"

I have been able to play movies remotely over a 100Mbps LAN with mplayer using xv.

High-resolution movies caused jerkiness, more sane ones worked fine.

Really, though, unless you have nothing to do with your network but have one computer spew raw video over it, you're better off running mplayer locally.

Video over 100Base-T

[Retribution]

I did it, just to see if I could. It worked fine for some movies, but couldn't quite keep up with some higher-res files. That, and I didn't have anything set up for sound at the time. This wasn't with LTSP, however, this was between my WinXP box (running the cygwin X server) and connecting to my Debian box with XDMCP.

I pose another question: When I tried to do the same thing, but run the X server on my laptop (G4 Titanium PowerBook, Mac OS 10.3) it completely failed to keep up. Any idea why this would

VLC

[AlgebraicSpore]

Try VLC. [videolan.org] It's not xine or mplayer but it supports plenty of codes including dvd play and it has a server program set up to display movies to remote hosts.