Hello Wouter,
You are right, the Sun Ray solution with windows is a three tier
solution (client - SRSS - Windows).
But that also gives you more flexibility than other thin client
solutions. Deciding what will be shown on a client can be controlled
from the server at anytime, based on smartcards, user login or whatever
parameter you choose to use.
No reinstallation or configuration is needed on the client itself.
So different users can access different Virtual desktops which might be
hosted on servers in different countries from the same client with a
their smartcard. All logic to control this behavior only needs to be
available on the sunray server farm. I think that is an unique feature
of the Sun Ray setup compared to other thin clients ;-)
Now back to the video performance.
MP4 is a highly compressed video format. You can not get much better
compression than MP4 at this time.
The drawback is that it is pretty cpu intensive to encode video in MP4
format. A current desktop CPU needs several seconds to encode 1 second
of HD video to MP4. So in order to get real time encoding you absolutely
need dedicated hardware at this time.
I am assuming that the Teradici hardware in the "server" is doing some
realtime encoding of the video which is generated by the "servers"
graphicscard. Maybe it is MP4 but it might also be some sort of MJPEG
compression which is faster to encode but results in less compression.
Now VMware want to do the encoding of the videostream in "software". In
my opinion it will be impossible to get the same level of compression in
"software" as MP4 uses, so the compression will be less resulting in
higher bandwidth usage.
What I was pointing out in my last email is that with the
Teredici/VMware solution there is a lot of decoding, encoding and
decoding going on in order to get the video played on the client.
The Sun Ray takes a much smarter approach.
It detects in Windows if it is a MP4 file. If it is a MP4 file it is
already optimal compressed so it does not needs to spend cpu cycles on
decoding it. The file is being streamed to the Sun Ray server. The Sun
Ray server does not do anything with it either. It redirects the stream
to the Sun Ray. Finally the Sun Ray decompresses the MP4 file in the
appropriate window on the screen.
Decompressing MP4 is easier so that can be done with a slower CPU like
the one in the SR2.
Since no encoding and decoding is done on any server it is a much less
CPU intensive way of getting the MP4 video played on the client than the
Teradici way. Since it uses the original MP4 highly compressed file, the
bandwidth usage will also be reduced to the absolute minimum.
Since decoding and encoding cpu cycles in the Teradici way use power,
the Sun Ray way is also much more environmentally friendly.
I am not part of the Sun Ray development team thus I might have over
simplified the Sun Ray and PCoIP technology.
If there is some thing which needs to be corrected in the assumptions
then please feel free to do so.
Kind regards,
Ivar
Wouter Coppens wrote:
The sun ray server requires a server (either real or virtual) and it's load
should be taken in account.
Wouter
On 02/11/09 13:03, "Ivar Janmaat" <[email protected]> wrote:
The Sun Ray 4.2 software solves the multimedia problem differently:
It
redirects Flash 9, MP4 and WMV content directly to the Sun Ray.
This means no
extra load on the server when playing these type of files.
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