Video multicast in LTSP

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Tue, 08 May 2007, Denis Melnikov wrote:

> Is there a solution to multicast video (e.g. DVD) to LTSP clients?

An LTSP person might give a better answer, but as a start I can tell you:

 - there should be multicast video player clients for linux (vlc, possibly
   xine, mplayer, totem)
 - a standard thin client runs the player software on the server and sends
   the picture across the network to the thin client.  This maybe be
   multicast to the server but is resoundingly unicast (and not likely to
   work well at all) to the thin client.
 - If your thin client is powerful enough, it is conceivable that you could
   have the video player run on the thin client, so you could multicast
   straight to it.  
 - One in-planning feature, is to be able to run some apps locally on your
   thin client.  This is not ready yet though and I imagine it's a good
   while away.
 - in feisty Oliver included a plugin for ltsp to make a web kiosk.  This
   just runs firefox locally on the thin client.  You could probably
   modify this to run a media player of your choice instead.  Take a look
   through these two:
	/usr/share/ltsp/plugins/ltsp-build-client/Ubuntu/030-kiosk
	https://wiki.edubuntu.org/HowtoWriteLTSP5Plugins
   You could then let certain machines boot up into a "media player kiosk"
   for video playback.

Your other problem is how to multicast the video to the clients.  As I
understand it, vlc can do this bit.

Gavin