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

Thomas Worth dev at rarevision.com
Tue Feb 21 18:28:42 CET 2012


> 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.
>
> 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!

I believe this is usually done with a SAN via iSCSI, in the case of
Ethernet. You'd basically be accessing the host as a block device
rather than through an NFS or Samba server. Streaming 4K uncompressed
video over a Samba network sounds like massive amounts of pain waiting
to happen.

Also, I wouldn't be playing the video in MPlayer. I'd be sending raw
RGB to a SDI output device so I could watch the result on a proper
calibrated display / projector. That's typically how it'd be done in a
proper post facility.


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