[FFmpeg-user] how to "play" uncompressed video across an network?

Donald McLachlan Donald.McLachlan at crc.ca
Tue Feb 21 18:49:01 CET 2012


On 21/02/2012 12:13 PM, Phil Rhodes wrote:

Hi Phil,

>> - Is there a container (preferably one supported by mplayer) that one 
>> can put uncompressed video and audio into?
>
> AVI, Quicktime. DPX sequences are most often used for this sort of 
> thing, but I'm not sure if mplayer supports it.

I've seen that Mplayer supports AVI, and it supports libav containers 
and codecs, so maybe DPX is supported.  TBD. I'll check.
So mplayer should be able to learn the video coding etc from the container?
The reason for Mplayer is we wish to display the videos on a SAGE wall 
(www.sagecommons.org), and a version of mplayer has been ported to SAGE.

>> - Is there a preferred way that this can be pushed or pulled across a 
>> network (ffserver?)?
>
> Worry first about your network infrastructure. Back of the envelope 
> calculation: assuming you're talking about a 4096-wide 16:9 image, 
> that'll be 1940 pixels high, and even at 8-bit, each frame will weigh 
> in at the best part of 23MB, without any sort of format overhead or 
> audio taken into account. That's nearly 600MB a second, which is about 
> half the theoretical total bandwidth of your 10 gig network. Certainly 
> you won't be doing more than one stream at once.

Yes, the last video we were looking at was 4096 x 2160.  At 24 
frames/sec and 24 bits/pixel that amounts to 5096 Mbps (5.1 Gbps).  Our 
purpose is to show streaming (including live streaming) of 4k video and 
to show how one can use fat pipes.  We may eventually want to do 8k on 
40 or 100 Gbps networks.  So the reasons for uncompressed are a) to load 
the network, b) speed - many codecs are too heavy to decode 4k in 
realtime.  N.B. I was able to "play" a 4096x2304 j2k in an mxf with 
ffplay. But on a quad core 3.6 GHz Xeon ffplay "played" at 1.6 
frames/sec. :-(


>
> Within that you can use anything that will allow you to remote access 
> the file - although I'd be interested to see if most samba 
> implementations could keep up!

This morning I was doing some network testing with nuttcp and was 
achieving 9.8 Gbps.  I'm not sure if any "file server" could do this. We 
might be better off writing a remote application for streaming the video 
to mplayer. Or initially, maybe tunnelling through nuttcp or netcat.

>
> P

Thanks again Phil,
Don



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