The Full Enchilada

Well, as I promised I just did some Live Video streaming tests with Theora video format (using libtheora on linux). What I can report is a video delay of about 22 seconds. It was about 45 (stream was around 27kbps I think)seconds when I had ffmpeg take the 192 x 144 screencapture area and resize it to stream it at 320 by 240, of course at the new 320×240 it was a bit zoomed in but seems like also the transcoding to resize added about 20 seconds delay (stream was around 58k-65kbps from what I recall). The stream was the linux desktop screencaptured since I didn’t have a webcam on the remote linux box, I served the live screencam stream off of icecast server running on the same box and served it up to view back on my local windows xp desktop through an html5 simple page served by apache on that same box, using the video embed tag to serve the icecast theora live video stream. (there was no audio in the stream, no audio was captured and no audio channel streamed..)

(see my previous post for the audio streaming tests details http://thefullenchilada.com/newstuff/comparison-firefox-html5-realtime-audio-streaming-of-ogg-vorbis-versus-standalone-player-zinf-theora-libtheora-video-also.htm )

Perhaps I should also mention that I was doing the screencapture of the remote linux box while being logged in to it remotely with NX (using freenx nxserver), but it was just a physical box, not a VMware virtual machine, VPS etc…so I think delay due to graphics driver issues can be overlooked, it was quite responsive and robust while using it through NX (by nomachine) remote desktop.

It’s quite unfortunate that currently video streaming is in a huge disarray, there’s nothing that works on everything, you have to recode/transcode for different platforms and serve with different servers. Apple may claim they’re the good guys pushing for HTML5 standards versus Adobe Flash proprietary plugins but some would say they are dishonest if they would try to play the pro-standards good guy when they do not wish to support OGG and Theora instead of their own AAC format etc…so sure html5 currently supports theora on the desktop but far as I know nothing supports theora on mobile platforms, they support only mpeg4/flac/aac/h264 etc..hopefully this will change soon but with everyone trying to push their own proprietary technology it may take a while if the consumers don’t force them to by demanding open protocols. (just don’t watch streams encoded in PATENT encumbered formats, if everyone did that you’d be amazed at how quickly open patent-free formats would become the most widely used…

Has the serpent given us the ‘forbidden Apple’?