Well the good news and the bad news....
Bad news:
Mplayer crashed horribly, it wanted me to submit a bug report.
I thought that like xawtv it had a side program for dealing with this sort of thing... but it didn't
Good news:
Well I tried Xine and it worked wonderfully the first try. I didn't even have to put any modifiers. The only problem I was having was that certain videos wouldn't play full screen, however most did (same formats... mpg, just one wouldn't play fullscreen, and a window media player format one wouldn't play full screen) But other then that it works fine.
At first it was a bit choppy so I tried a couple different video outputs, and that produced slightly different visual problems then the others. Like image shearing instead of lost frames.
So I tried ssh with the -C flag set for compression, and then it worked with absolute no noticable slowdown... exept maybe a slight lag at full screen. But the image quality was about as good as having it the client's own desktop.
I have only a 10Mbits network though.. With extremely bad wiring (if it ain't broke don't fix it). I never measured it, but I suppose I am getting only 4-7Megs anyways... So you aught to be set with your screaming 100MB!
Of course that is only going to handle the visual bits! X doesn't have anything to do with audio, so that doesn't get piped thru my ssh... However I believe you can use esd to do this.. also if you are a kde fan you can use artsd (actually you can isntall artsd seperate) to achieve "network transperency"
quote from:
http://www.arts-project.org/doc/mcop-doc/artsd-faq.html
network transparency
What do I need for network transparency?
Enable it in kcontrol (enable X11 server for security information and network transparency). Then go and copy your .mcoprc to all machines you plan to use network transparency from. Relogin. Make sure that the hosts that interact know each other by name (i.e. make sure that they have resolvable names or are in /etc/hosts).
This should be all you need to do. Anyway, here are a few more internals which may help you if things don't work at once.
The aRts sound server process "artsd" should only run one host, the one with the soundcard, where the sound should be played. It can be started automatically on login by KDE (if you configure that in kcontrol), or manually using something like:
artsd -n -F 5 -S 8192
(the -n parameter is for network transparency, while the others configure latency).
Your .mcoprc file should have this entry for GlobalComm:
GlobalComm=Arts::X11GlobalComm
for network transparency to work, on all machines involved. This is what KDE will put there if you enable "X11 server for security information" there.
Finally, in any KDE version in the 2.0.x series, there is a bug which applies if you don't have a domainname set. Clients of artsd try to find where to connect to via the <hostname>.<domainname> combination. If your domainname is empty, it will try to connect <hostname>. <- note the dot is too much. Adding an entry like this to /etc/hosts (i.e. orion. if your hostname is orion) works around the problem.
When it works isn't this a much more pleasent to use system then the VNC-style remote client stuff? When it's set up you can actually get work done over it without struggling with laggy mice pointers.
If I was designing a Linux work enviroment from the ground up, I'd use a bunch of thin clients (X servers) for desktop users and get one of those 32-proccessor jobs (or what ever unix server is in the budget) to run services to them all and some nice switches to preserve bandwidth. Complete and total centralized managment of resources... non of that roving desktop BS,(uploading and downloading 300-400 different american flag desktops wallpapers
) Or maybe have a couple realy state of the art multi proccessor (4-8) x86 servers for each room. And have them serve thin clients for a floor or department or something. Or a simple cluster of Linux PC's so that if one goes down everybody will not even notice.
That would give you a much more effective managment of hardware. Since the majority of the time people are either typing out e-mails or just staring at the screen thinking then you can share the cpu time more effectively. That way you can concitrate on improving I/O with your harddrives to impove sharing documents and stuff easily. And when you upgrade you don't have to deal with a hundred desktops, you just deal with one server. x86's are cheap, but a few servers are cheaper compared to a couple hundred desktops. When you need to make a new program aviable or update one then you only have to do it a few times, instead of a hundred times.
Make system wide backups a dream. Instead of getting workers to backup there important files you can do incremental backups of there homefolders.. or if that is to much then specially designated folders in there home directory. No more "lost" floppies, cd's or Zips or workers who can't backup files to save their life (or their jobs)
File sharing is simple a proccess of copying one file from a home folder to another. Your able to very easily monitor resources and control access to different programs.. So if it is against your company policy to do yahoo chat over the internet, or stream music you can make it a non-issue, by a few simple keystrokes.
Ah, I can dream can't I? All I wanted to be when I was growing up was a little BOFH....
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