x over ip (including sound) on weak hw

DaggyStyle · Watchman Joined: 22 Mar 2006 Posts: 5941

hello,
I have a small question, I'm thinking of getting one of these mini extra small atom/amd new desktops (cheap) with hdmi output, attach a n wifi adapter to it and stream an x session to it and redirect it to the hdmi output.
my goal is to watch fhd on it, does anyone knows if it will work/done it?
also, any ideas how to redirect the sound to?

thanks.
_________________
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity and I'm not sure about the former - Albert Einstein

TJNII · l33t Joined: 09 Nov 2003 Posts: 648 Location: for(;;);

I'm kinda doing what you have in mind, but not the way you're invisioning.

I have a bunch of thin clients sprinkled about. The two I use the most are my desktop and the TV client. Both are currently 800Mhz HP think clients.

On the desktop I use tigerVNC for X. I chose VNC so that my desktop would persist across client reboots, a feature I value highly. Good-old X over SSH or raw X over TCP are also options, and probably faster, but neither offer the persistence I want. I currently don't stream sound, I don't have I need. I only listen to music, and I just run MPD on the client for that. Pulseaudio and NAS (network audio system) are two projects I'd look into. I've done it with Pulse before, so that is an option of you can tolerate the bugs.

The other main thin client I use id connected to the TV. I watch DVD movies on it without issue. I haven't tried HD, but I doubt my hardware could handle it. For this I don't do any X or audio streaming, I know that would be too processor intensive. For this I've found the best option is run mplayer locally on the thin client and play to the framebuffer. It works quite well. This is the route I would recommend for you; decoding the movie and throwing over X is probably going to add too much overhead. You should also be able to decode the movie on another box and stream it to mplayer to reduce processing overhead. I haven't tried this myself yet, though. The other advantage to a multimedia stream as opposed to X + audio is that the stream will keep your audio and video in sync. I've done video over X plus an audio stream in the past and it had noticeable sync issues.

boerKrelis

DaggyStyle · Watchman Joined: 22 Mar 2006 Posts: 5941

I'd rather not use pulseaudio, afaik it is too buggy.
problem is that I need a way to pass video into my tv, I can pass a hdmi cable but the length is ~15 meters from the tv to the comp so I'm not sure about the signal
_________________
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity and I'm not sure about the former - Albert Einstein

boerKrelis · Posted: Mon Dec 20, 2010 7:26 pm Post subject:

TJNII · l33t Joined: 09 Nov 2003 Posts: 648 Location: for(;;);

Watched a movie in VNC on my thin client tonight while doing paperwork. I set up Jack as the audio link instead of Pulse.

Guide is here: http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/JACK

Be advised that jack is media-sound/jack-audio-connection-kit not media-sound/jack.