H264 streaming = 2FPS

Hi

I have big problems with video streaming on SL. I'm using Darvin stream server. Everythings seems to be fine but... H264 movies give me 1-4FPS like... SL become very,very slow when I play a movie. It's dramaticaly perfomace impact. The best ressolution I can play (more or less smoth) is 320x152 ...

I know my pc's insnt very fast 2.8ghz 1gb ram Nvidia 7800 ... still... I've made some tests. If I start Quicktime player on windows and play the stream and in the same time I'm on SL and move around (both windows are in background) there 44fps on SL and movie run smooth, all is fine. So why does this not work on SL?

The other weird thing .. when I play mov Trailer (hd) they work on SL. Not as perfect as on Quicktime + SL splitted, but they are fine...

Could it be there is some nasty bug?

Your 'nasty bug' is no more than the fact when you render movies in SL, you are using a pluggin not a full blown player, also the format you are using is not SL friendly, nor is NTSC or PAL formats.

Press Ctrl+Shift+2, the lime green section of the graph, which updates in realtime, signifies UpdateImage (movies amongst other things), turn on the movie stream and watch that climb. If that climbs above 50% your client acts like treacle and FPS drops. Basically, your client is struggling to keep up with the data stream. In addition, many people use heavy settings within their codex, in order to acheive a small data bit rate, the net result is not only is the client rendering the movie, the system has to decompress the stream beforehand, so your CPU cycles drop and become defocused.

What you should be targetting is: 100kbps data bit rate or less (preferably around 60-75kbps) and 20-35% loading on the client when rendering, and little if any loss of fps.

We postproduce movies at the equivant size in sl of 480x480, with music and sound effects in full stereo (forget mp3, use IMA 4:1 codex) at around 100kbps with 20-30% load on the client and sparing use of a compressive codex. Its what you do at post production stage that makes the difference.

Is there a reason you are using a darwin server and streaming with RTSP? Usefull for 'live broadcasts' but wasteful on resources otherwise. I assume you did copy the header file created with the H.264 format, along with the movie file to the server? It is possible to flatten the header file within the movie and encapsulate it. Did you use a mp4 codex within the H.264 wrapper format?