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blueflame

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Apr 3, 2003
852
147
Studio City
ok, so here is what I am wondering. Whe leapord is out, ichat has the new screen sharing feature. it seems that it is somehow sending full resolution imaged over it right?, or close to? becuase it is a direct screen grab, and not a video signal. anyway. If I were to be playing a movie in full screen, sould I not activate that, and let someone remotly watch the video? simply by doing an ichat.? hmm. that would be cool, bu sems like it should take a long time. ubt if they incorporated those torrents system into leapord that they rumored about maybe?
anyone?
A
 

topgun072003

macrumors 6502
Sep 11, 2006
309
0
Los Angeles, CA
Screen sharing puts you at their computer, by using the internet. I suppose that when you were using their computer you could turn on a movie and watch it, but I don't know how smooth it would run. Actually it would most likely be choppy, because sometimes the screen has to refresh, and you see like a line going down the screen refreshing it. So I don't think that it would run that smooth, unless you each had like amazing internet speeds.
 

blueflame

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Apr 3, 2003
852
147
Studio City
Screen sharing puts you at their computer, by using the internet. I suppose that when you were using their computer you could turn on a movie and watch it, but I don't know how smooth it would run. Actually it would most likely be choppy, because sometimes the screen has to refresh, and you see like a line going down the screen refreshing it. So I don't think that it would run that smooth, unless you each had like amazing internet speeds.

ok, now assuming the quality is scaled down a little, to say, 320x240. how would that look? it wouldnt look terrible on even a 24" computer screen.do you think this is something that would be possible? are you running a leapord preview where you could try?
A
 

Anonymous Freak

macrumors 603
Dec 12, 2002
5,559
1,246
Cascadia
Apple has released few details on how Screen Sharing, or iChat Theater, really work.

I would imagine that iChat Theater (the one that lets you do 'presentations' over iChat,) works similarly to a multi-person video chat, with the presentation just being one of the video feeds. That means that it would likely cap out at 320x240 or 640x480.

Screen Sharing, though, has even LESS information that iChat Theater. Based on the way it is described, though, I would imagine that it does, indeed, send the full quality screen. Probably using something like VNC, or Apple Remote Desktop. This means that over a standard high speed internet connection (256 kb/s upload speed, as that will be the limiter, not download speed,) video will be unwatchable. I know that watching videos over VNC on my 100 megabit connection is slow, so a 256 kbit connection would be worse. (I use VNC to access my home computer remotely over a 640kbps upstream connection, set to 800x600 resolution, 16-bit color. It is marginally usable for non-video things, and videos are a joke, maybe 1 frame every 2 seconds.)
 

Arne

macrumors regular
May 14, 2006
172
0
Germany
I am sorry but it will NOT work. The Movie Players work with an hardware overlay. I don't have a Mac here ATM, but try to do a screenshot of a playing movie. You will not see the movie on it. But, if you put the window with the screenshot above the movie-window, you will be able to see it again. Thats because the graphics card replaces one specific color in the area the moviel should be playing. However, this color is what your friend will be seeing, nothing of the movie.

But if you want to share a movie over a network (such as the internet), try Video LAN Client. I haven't used this over the internet, but it works fluent on a Local network. You should however know some things about networks to set it up, especially if you want to send it to an (unlimited) number of cliennts in your LAN using multicast (UDP), you should know how such things work.

Bottomline: VLC is what you are looking for ;)
 
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