[osg-users] Synchronized movie playing across the network

[OpenSceneGraph Users]

All,

I need to synchronize movie playback among multiple machines across the network in my OpenSceneGraph application. I'd like to try to use the same style of synchronization that mplayer uses. This involves one instance acting as a master timer and the other instances (all running on different machines) acting as clients. The master sends a network broadcast at regular intervals telling the clients which is the next frame and when to switch to it. The time to switch can either be done as an absolute time (which implies that all of the clocks on the network machines are already synchronized) or a time relative to the beginning of the movie, or perhaps even a frame number. The clients may be playing the same movie, but more often they will be playing small pieces of a larger movie.

I'd like to leverage the OSG plugins (particularly ffmpeg) as much as possible, so I'm thinking of modifying the ImageStream class to enable this type of synchronization, so that any ImageStream can utilize it if desired.

Does this sound useful to other developers? Does something like this already exist? I'd be interested in sharing ideas and code, with the understanding that everything developed gets back into the source OSG distribution. For starters, I'm interested in how current applications do synchronization across different machines, such as in a cluster. I think that there are mechanisms in OSG to do things like this, but I'm not familiar with them. Pointers are appreciated. Thanks!

Eric

[OpenSceneGraph Users]

Hi Eric,

The osgcluster example provides an example of using UDP packets to synchronise the frame and view from master to slaves across a network so has some similarities to video synchronisation.

On the video front setting the image stream should be possible right now, though it's a number of years since I work with videos so that's just off the top of my head.

Robert. 

[OpenSceneGraph Users]

Hi Robert,

Yes, I was also looking at the osgcluster example. I may use something similar to synchronize the video playback.Thanks.

Eric

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