[mythtv-users] Way out idea on watching same thing in multiplerooms

David Brodbeck gull at gull.us
Tue Jan 5 00:39:21 UTC 2010


On Mon, January 4, 2010 4:29 pm, Tortise wrote:
> Hmmm Well lets see if we are on the same page here?  With multicast it is
> like a broadcast over the LAN, so using UDP any client
> (VLC can be client and server here) can tap into the same multicast IP and
> see the same content in real time, just like a
> broadcast....where are the latency issues?

I think the point that was trying to be made was that while the network
data is being *sent* in sync, the players won't necessarily *play it* in
sync if there's buffering involved (which there usually is, with network
playback.)  If one player has a moment where its CPU is busy or simply has
a slightly slower time reference it will read back further in its buffer
and fall out of sync.  Without trying it it's hard to say if this will be
enough of a problem to be noticeable in actual use.

Multicast could be part of a solution, but by itself it doesn't solve the
problem.  It's actually meant to solve an entirely different problem --
trying to serve N clients with an M kbps stream when you have less than
N*M kbps of total bandwidth.




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