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We replaced H.264 streaming with JPEG screenshots (and it worked better)

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Re: We replaced H.264 streaming with JPEG screenshots (and it worked better)

#61

Post by brigade »

HelloUsername wrote: post #40
Dylan16807 wrote: post #15

> When the network is bad, you get... fewer JPEGs. That’s it. The ones that arrive are perfect. You can have still have weird broken stallouts though. I dunno, this article has some good problem solving but the biggest and mostly untouched issue is that they set the minimum h.264 bandwidth too high. H.264 can do a lot better than JPEG with a lot less bandwidth. But if you lock it at 40Mbps of course it's flaky. Try 1…

> Try 1Mbps and iterate from there. From the article: “Just lower the bitrate,” you say. Great idea. Now it’s 10Mbps of blocky garbage that’s still 30 seconds behind.

Proper rate control for such realtime streaming would also lower framerate and/or resolution to maintain the best quality and latency they can over dynamic network conditions and however little bandwidth they have. The fundamental issue is that they don't have this control loop at all, and are badly simulating it by polling JPEGs.

Re: We replaced H.264 streaming with JPEG screenshots (and it worked better)

#62

Post by dylan604 »

gspr wrote: post #41
embedding-shape wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the general idea/flow of things is "numbers go up, until $bubble explodes, and we built up smaller things from the ground up, making numbers go up, bloating go up, until $bubble explodes..." and then repeat that forever. Seems to be the end result of capitalism. If you wanna kill corporate IT, you have to kill capitalism first.

I don't believe that. I don't necessarily love capitalism (though I can't say I see very many realistic better alternatives either), but if HN is full of people who could do corporate IT better (read: sanely), then the conclusion is just that corporate IT is run by morons. Maybe that's because the corporate owners like morons, but nothing about capitalism inherently makes it so.

> corporate IT is run by morons

playing devil's advocate for a second, but corpIT is also working with morons as employees. most draconian rules used by corpIT have a basis in at least one real world example. whether that example happened directly by one of the morons they manage or passed along from corpIT lore, people have done some dumb ass things on corp networks.

Re: We replaced H.264 streaming with JPEG screenshots (and it worked better)

#63

Post by adamjs »

They might want to check out what VNC has been doing since 1998– keep the client-pull model, break the framebuffer up into tiles and, when client requests an update, perform a diff against last frame sent, composite the updated tiles client-side. (This is what VNC falls back to when it doesn’t have damage-tracking from the OS compositor)

This would really cut down on the bandwidth of static coding terminals where 90% of screen is just cursor flashing or small bits of text moving.

If they really wanted to be ambitious they could also detect scrolling and do an optimization client-side where it translates some of the existing areas (look up CopyRect command in VNC).

Re: We replaced H.264 streaming with JPEG screenshots (and it worked better)

#66

Post by streptomycin »

egorfine wrote: post #5

> The constraint that ruined everything: It has to work on enterprise networks. > You know what enterprise networks love? HTTP. HTTPS. Port 443. That’s it. That’s the list. That's not enough. Corporate networks also love to MITM their own workstations and reinterpret http traffic. So, no WebSockets and no Server-Side Events either, because their corporate firewall is a piece of software no one in the world wants and…

Back when I had a job at a big old corporation, a significant part of my value to the company was that I knew how to bypass their shitty MITM thing that broke tons of stuff, including our own software that we wrote. So I could solve a lot of problems people had that otherwise seemed intractable because IT was not allowed to disable it, and they didn't even understand the myriad ways it was breaking things.

Re: We replaced H.264 streaming with JPEG screenshots (and it worked better)

#67

Post by mananaysiempre »

dylan604 wrote: post #62
gspr wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe that. I don't necessarily love capitalism (though I can't say I see very many realistic better alternatives either), but if HN is full of people who could do corporate IT better (read: sanely), then the conclusion is just that corporate IT is run by morons. Maybe that's because the corporate owners like morons, but nothing about capitalism inherently makes it so.

> corporate IT is run by morons playing devil's advocate for a second, but corpIT is also working with morons as employees. most draconian rules used by corpIT have a basis in at least one real world example. whether that example happened directly by one of the morons they manage or passed along from corpIT lore, people have done some dumb ass things on corp networks.

Yes, and the problem in that picture is the belief (whichever level of the management hierarchy it comes from) that you can introduce technical impediments against every instance of stupidity one by one until morons are no longer able to stupid. Morons will always find a way to stupid, and most organizations push the impediments well past the point of diminishing returns.

Re: We replaced H.264 streaming with JPEG screenshots (and it worked better)

#68

Post by unethical_ban »

kbelder wrote: post #58
gruez wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And you have to work around that, because IT dept of the corporation will never lift restrictions. Because otherwise people do dumb stuff like pasting proprietary designs or PII into deepseek

Oh, they'll do that anyway, once they find the workaround (Oh... you can paste a credit card if you put periods instead of dashes! Oh... I have to save the file and do it from my phone! Oh... I'll upload it as a .txt file and change the extension on the server!) It's purely illusory security, that doesn't protect anything but does levy a constant performance tax on nearly every task.

What's the term for the ideology that "laws are silly because people sometimes break them"?

Re: We replaced H.264 streaming with JPEG screenshots (and it worked better)

#69

Post by mananaysiempre »

embedding-shape wrote: post #33
ris wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporate IT needs to die.

I think the general idea/flow of things is "numbers go up, until $bubble explodes, and we built up smaller things from the ground up, making numbers go up, bloating go up, until $bubble explodes..." and then repeat that forever. Seems to be the end result of capitalism. If you wanna kill corporate IT, you have to kill capitalism first.

I’d say there’s nothing inherently capitalist about large and stupid bureaucracies (but I repeat myself) spending money in stupid ways. Military bureaucracies in capitalist countries do it. Military bureaucracies in socialist countries did it. Everything else in end-stage socialist countries did it too. I’m sorry, it’s not the capitalism—things’d be much easier if it were.

Re: We replaced H.264 streaming with JPEG screenshots (and it worked better)

#70

Post by bogwog »

MBCook wrote: post #65

So it’s video of an AI typing text? Why not just send text? Why do you need video at all?

Why send anything at all if the AI isn't even good enough to solve their own problems?

(Although the fact they decided to use Moonlight in an enterprise product makes me wonder if their product actually was vibe coded)

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