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Application level audio control! You will be able to raise the volume for the movie you are watching (that was no doubt ripped from a DVD and has low volume) and not go deaf when someone IM's you.

yawn

I've been able to do this for years with 4Front OSS. Mind you, linux's truly free [freedom] sound drivers are generally pretty lousy... 4Front's stuff is pWN. Its available for free [no money] now, so linux people might want to check it out.

On the topic of sound, check this out X.org's sound server thingy I believe its supposed to have all sorts of features like that. If only the damn thing would COME OUT -- argh, like so many awesome linux things, always "soon" always "soon" soon soon soon! blaagh!

--SD

Right now, you'd proably want to run locally. This isn't a limitation of LTSP as such, but of the X11 protocol as it now stands. Better protocol compression, or the use of something like
MA S</a> will hopefully help in future.

Low res video should be fine. We do fine here displaying even quite complex flash in browsers over 10/100 ... to Pentium 100 clients. I wouldn't try to watch a DVD, though.

The only way to find out for sure is test it. If you have both a laptop and a desktop, enable XDMCP on the desktop then connect with the laptop (X -query $DESKTOP_HOSTNAME when X is not already running; make sure there's no firewall on either host). Log in and try playing some video to see how you go.

The easiest way to get decent performance will definitely be to run the player as a local app on the client. LTSP has good support for this sort of thing, thankfully.

You might also want to search the LTSP mailing list archives.

--
Craig Ringer

With regard to the plans for new media and networking features in GNOME, I hope that the GNOME team leverages efforts from the x.org project to work towards a common implementation of those features. In particular, I think that the Media Application Server looks very promising. Since future versions of GNOME will likely be running on x.org anyways, the wheel should not be re-invented with respect to advanced media features.

What about MAS the Media Application Server for X, which is on track to be a standard part of X?

That's funny. There's a MAS as well. MAS looks like the one people are starting to settle on. Time will tell...

I agree. The protocol exists, but it is not yet implemented by XFree86.

What about using MAS (Media Application Server) to provide network transparent sound? MAS already does this outside of the kernel and could be integrated into the kernel.

We're working on MAS.

Public CVS is more up-to-date than our 0.6.0 release , so if you're going to check it out, get it from CVS.

It mixes multiple streams, can convert sampling rates, and doesn't need a half-second long buffer. We haven't got it to slice and dice yet, though.

The API that is in there is VERY low level. We've been working hard on a high-level "soundserver-style" API that'll allow esd and OSS apps to be ported easily. It'll be out when-it's-done, which will be soon.

-Mike

Putting media services in the X protocol would probably be a good idea, but it is orthogonal to a kernel mode audio mixer. Some programs will always want to access the hardware more directly, and the server itself still needs to access the hardware. The kernel API will still be used, it needs to work well.

further more, and more basically, why should one API (X) cover input and output to entirely separate device classes? i have never seen any video adapters capable of handling sound, nor any audio interfaces capable of handling video.

One of the goals of the MAS guys is accessibility. They want to grab system beeps and turn it into a screen event. Pretty neat. Not directly relevant to your point, but neat.

X.org is the replacement for the old X Consortium, and it is working on new technologies for X, including the Media Application Server (MAS), a "network transparent sound protocol that runs in parallel with X to deliver the sound portion of apps."

Admittedly, it has been almost two years since X.org released X11R6.6, but work is in progress on X11R6.7.

Nobody is working on X12, because X12 implies breaking compatibility with X11, and no one has yet come up with a compelling reason to do so that can't be handled via extensions to X11.

Or MAS, which is an X.org standard?

http://www.mediaapplicationserver.net/indexframes. html

...I got very little faith in these guys.

(a) Frames? What is this, 1996?
(b) Worse than that, frames without scrollbars when they're needed (ie. the left and middle frames). Apparently, they tested it on a 1600xsomething monitor and didn't bother to test any lower resolutions (such as, say, 1024x768...)

Anyway, there's a screenshot if you highlight and scroll down the middle frame...

They can use MAS to serve the info. (It's a new open source project worth checking out. They just made their first release.)