Re: QEMU VNC Audio Patch



On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 09:46:17AM -0500, Steven Carr wrote:
> On Monday 12 December 2011 09:35:11 Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> > On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 02:27:51PM +0100, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
> > > One fundamental issue the vnc audio extension has is that both audio and
> > > video travel over the same tcp pipe.  So a bulky screen update can
> > > easily disturb audio playback by delaying the audio stream.  With slower
> > > network it will be more noticeable of course.
> > 
> > Yeah, I'm not really expecting this VNC audio support to be a serious
> > alternative to SPICE with audio. It was still nice to have the audio
> > support in GTK-VNC though
>
>    I actually run 3 or 4 VM's on the same machine as the viewer.
> 
>    I do not think that the VNC protocol is significantly different than the MP4 
> protocol.   Both can interlace audio/video data.   And both can provide a 
> quality experience.   In my opinion, it is really up to the *encoder* to 
> ensure that the audio/video is multiplexed appropriately in the stream so that 
> the client can properly decode things.   VNC protocol has the added benefit 
> that the server can detect how powerful the client/network is via measuring 
> the latency of updates.   It is my opinion that if the MPEG protocol can do 
> it, so can the VNC protocol.
> 
>    Alternatively, the gtk-vnc client *could* make a second VNC connection to 
> the same server, log-in, negotiate audio encodings, and not perform framebuffer 
> requests.  Just listen for audio  (or request 1 pixel updates or something 
> like that).   A dual connection approach that is also compatible with a single 
> connection approach.

Sure, the QEMU server could be improved to cope better with audio vs large
framebuffer updates, and the Audio-over-VNC protocol could be improved too.
Given the inclusion of SPICE in QEMU though, I just don't see many developers
caring enough to want todo this for VNC. The main benefit of VNC over SPICE
is that VNC clients are widely deployed / available. This benefit is lost
though in the context of audio-over-VNC since it is a custom extension defined
by QEMU which few VNC clients implement. As such I think SPICE really has the
upper hand for the future.

Regards,
Daniel
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