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Screen sharing compatability anybody?
Today I was trying to help a friend get started on VO, and we had been doing screen-sharing over iChat. He asked me to stay on his screen and help him figure out the basics, if you have ever done screen-sharing, you have probably noticed that it's a bit fuzzy and slightly laggy. Ironically, the thing that kept us from making it work, was that VO seems to be too high quality to be shared over the internet. My computer (I was on the recieving end) seemed to be loading a section of the screen, then another, and then reloading the first one, then second, and so on. If I had to guess I would say I was getting about 1/4 FPS. Would it be possible to have a dev take a very quick look into it, and then either put it on your to-do list for after you've got everything else done, or possibly just make the edit if it's an easy thing to do? Also, if anybody else has done screen-sharing and had it work, could i get some help making mine work?
Um.
A 1024x768 screen at 24 bpp is 2359296 bytes per frame. You want 30 frames per second, say. That's, um, 70.8 megabytes per second (566.4 megabits/second), not counting all of the overhead of TCP. I somehow doubt you have that kind of Internet connection.
Yes, you could compress the stream. But then you're asking a computer to do compression of an extremely high-bandwidth video stream in real-time. Which is even harder.
A 1024x768 screen at 24 bpp is 2359296 bytes per frame. You want 30 frames per second, say. That's, um, 70.8 megabytes per second (566.4 megabits/second), not counting all of the overhead of TCP. I somehow doubt you have that kind of Internet connection.
Yes, you could compress the stream. But then you're asking a computer to do compression of an extremely high-bandwidth video stream in real-time. Which is even harder.
To do this properly, we would have to build the feature into the game, and use protocol-level updates rendered within the engine. However, that's kind of.. not a small undertaking.
Otherwise, like Rogue says, the sheer amount of data is pretty staggering. You could try reducing the quality and resolution as much as possible (800x600) and then hoping that iChat's compression can keep up with it, but that's not easy. 1/4 frame per second is not bad.
That kind of "screen sharing" is designed for applications that are fundamentally static. Like sharing Photoshop.. it's a bunch of icons with an image, very little changes over time. If you do some huge complex filter, then fine, it has to send the entire image contents.. but most of the time the changes are a small percentage of the total screen area.
A videogame, on the other hand, is constantly changing and refreshing the screen with new graphics. Our station interface, with the backgrounds turned off, would probably run ok.. but the game practically never will. Nor will any other game of that sort.
Otherwise, like Rogue says, the sheer amount of data is pretty staggering. You could try reducing the quality and resolution as much as possible (800x600) and then hoping that iChat's compression can keep up with it, but that's not easy. 1/4 frame per second is not bad.
That kind of "screen sharing" is designed for applications that are fundamentally static. Like sharing Photoshop.. it's a bunch of icons with an image, very little changes over time. If you do some huge complex filter, then fine, it has to send the entire image contents.. but most of the time the changes are a small percentage of the total screen area.
A videogame, on the other hand, is constantly changing and refreshing the screen with new graphics. Our station interface, with the backgrounds turned off, would probably run ok.. but the game practically never will. Nor will any other game of that sort.
Here is one for you... no.
Ok, i'll try bringing down the graphics settings and see if that helps. but it's not like, a huge priority for me or anything so you guys can forget I asked.