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Date:      Fri, 17 Jan 1997 09:13:14 -0600 (CST)
From:      Jim Lowe <james@miller.cs.uwm.edu>
To:        batie@aahz.jf.intel.com, hasty@rah.star-gate.com
Cc:        freebsd-multimedia@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: realaudio player
Message-ID:  <199701171513.JAA22741@miller.cs.uwm.edu>

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> Make a mountain out of a molehill, it sounds like.  The vic sender is a
> data source for some tests and at least part of the problem was a
> misunderstanding of the operation of the little interior window (i.e.
> vic says it's sending out 30fps, but that's not what it shows).  It was
> prompted by various test receivers asking "can't you get the bitrate
> higher?"  When I crank the slider up to max, it peaks at around 280Kbps,
> so I have to answer "no" and they go away thinking "what a puny machine".

The little window in vic is really just a fancy icon.  To really see the
video, you have to click on the icon and a real window comes up.  The
icon window is only updated once per second (or whatever is specified
by the -U option).

> 
> Now that the question has gotten the spotlight on it however, I'm wondering
> if it's just that vic can't figure out a reason to put out more data.
> Perhaps that's just all that's changing, since it's just a camera pointed
> at a lab.  I am ignoring the case when there's no one there --- the data
> rate drops to 175K or less when it's just staring at static monitors.  The
> 280+Kbps rate is with people moving around, waving arms, etc.
> 
> Maybe I'll hook a vcr up with an action movie and see what happens...
> 

Much will depend on your cpu/memory speed.  The h.261 compress/decompression
algorithms in vic are very memory/cpu intensive.  You can see this by
setting the bandwidth sliders and fps sliders all the way up (with a low
ttl), then transmit a small window with a lot of motion (TV commericals
switch images about every 3-5 seconds -- great test).  Vic will keep
up at about 30fps.  If you change the size to a normal window the bit
rate will go down and you will not approach the maximum fps or bandwidth.
Mpeg has the same problems as h.261, just a little more pronounced -- although
there is hardware assist available for mpeg these days.

One could make a few modifications to the meteor driver for vic to
avoid one memory copy of the input frame and it might be able to keep
up at normal size, 30fps -- I have never tried this.

	-Jim



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