Thanks to all for your suggestions; I'll look into those. Today I've been playing with a program called mod_video, which is an Apache module that grabs frames from a bttv card. I have it working with both a small java and a javascript client and it runs more than 1 fps (over fast ethernet seems to get maybe 5 or 6). Unfortunately, however, as soon as another client connects, everything goes to #@$(. I don't mind framerates dropping, but there is no reasoning behind the way resources get doled out. Seems to me that what I need is a server that grabs an image from the card into memory, repeatedly, as fast as possible. That server should then spawn off new threads for every connected client, sending them 'copies' of the current image in memory. Right now, I've got everybody asking the v4l device for images all the time and it just can't keep up. Its not even a CPU issue as CPU load is low. Anyway, I can see that this is a good route, but I don't think I've got time to write it in the next week :) > 1fps at what bandwidth ? Without that kind of info its hard for anyone to > help. For small images at 1-2fps you can do amazing things with some > aggressive filters a bit of javascript and gif (rle encoded in the USA) Can you do these amazing things with multiple clients? 1 fps over ethernet and/or broadband (i.e. DSL, cable, etc.) would be sufficient. > mpeg-4 is patent trapped. You will be required to pay per minute for > streaming. I have VP3.2 compiling on Linux now which may be more interesting Yeah, I read this recently. Haven't heard of the VP3.2; will look into it. Sigh, if only the ffmpeg realserver stuff really worked. Thanks, Ben
