MPEG 4 on View

[shatford]

I am testing out a solution in which I am needing to run mpeg 4 video streams from a View desktop session. I have tried just about everything, and all I get is a little black box where the video should be. I can play M-jpeg streams just fine. I know that the video is playing because the motion detection icon is flashing indicating movement on the video. Am I just trying to make the View client do too much? I have MMR enabled, but it doesn't seem to help. The guest is a Windows XP SP2 workstation. I am running View 3.01 on a VI3.5 release 2 servers.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Bob

[admin]

Hi Bob,

in the VMware View 3 admin guide they write:

View Client and View Client with Offline Desktop: MMR

The multimedia redirection (MMR) feature redirects certain multimedia codecs

running on the remote desktop to the local client for rendering of full‐motion video and

audio. *Windows XP and XPe are the only client operating systems that support MMR*

on View Client and View Client with Offline Desktop. MMR supports the following

media formats:

+ AC3+

+ MP3+

+ MPEG‐1+

+ MPEG‐2+

+ MPEG‐4‐part2+

+ WMA+

+ WMV 7/8/9+

The recommended application to use with these files is Windows Media Player 10—this

application supports MMR and should be installed on both the client and View

Manager desktop.

NOTE MMR will not work correctly if the View Client video display hardware does

not have overlay support.

MPEG4-Part2 should be supported. Are you using a Windows OS as client? This shouln't be Vista, due to the restrictions on Windows XP and XPe. Do you have the codecs on both devices, agent and client? As MPEG4 is not supported with Windows MEdia Player withou special codec packs, please check the MS website: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/316992

MPEG-4 (.mp4)

MPEG-4 is an International Standards Organization (ISO) specification that covers many aspects of multimedia presentation including compression, authoring and delivery. Although video compression and file container definition are two separate and independent entities of the MPEG-4 specification, many people incorrectly believe that the two are interchangeable. You can implement only portions of the MPEG-4 specification and remain compliant with the standard.

The MPEG-4 file format, as defined by the MPEG-4 specification, contains MPEG-4 encoded video and Advanced Audio Coding (AAC)-encoded audio content. It typically uses the .mp4 extension. Windows Media Player does not support the playback of the .mp4 file format. You can play back .mp4 media files in Windows Media Player when you install DirectShow-compatible MPEG-4 decoder packs. DirectShow-compatible MPEG-4 decoder packs include the Ligos LSX-MPEG Player and the EnvivioTV.

[shatford]

Well, my biggest problem is that the application is to view Security video from IP camera's and the application to view them is proprietary to the manufacturer. So unfortunately I have no way of viewing the video with Windows Media Player. I did find something funny tho. I removed the mpeg4 codec from the agent machine, and the video feed in mpeg4 directly from the camera came up, but now their application won't work since the mpeg4 codec is no longer installed.

[merovingianA51]

Hey guys, has anyone been able to make any headway on this issue?

Bob, I think we have a very similar problem. We run an extensive IP camera system that has always used physical servers. Historically, we have run analog cameras to Axis IP streamers. We have a proprietary system that uses a centralized database server to assign cameras to various localized camera servers which basically act as storage systems for the camera footage. The end user uses a web browser to hit the database server which requests streams from corresponding camera servers.

Recently we began piloting VM guests (Windows 2003 SP2 R2) to act as camera servers. All of our POE Axis 216FD fixed cameras work fine streaming to the VM servers. For some strange reason our PTZ cameras that use Axis 241S streamers will not stream to the database server/end client when using MPEG 4 compression. It's the strangest thing - we can flip the codec over to motion JPEG and the camera will communicate fine. And if we flip the camera over to a physical box in the same datacenter the camera works fine with either MPEG 4 or motion JPEG. It's the strangest thing because it is literally the flip of a switch - VM and MPEG 4 and the software refuses to communicate with the camera.

We are running ESX 3.5 update 4. I've tried VLAN tagging, not tagging (flat switch)... no go. I'm wondering if it's something to do with the VM NIC driver... or maybe video? I'm definitely a little perplexed.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Cheers!

Shawn

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"Crippling Microsoft is the geek equivalent of taking down the Death Star"

[shatford]

No, we never did get a solution for this. Honestly, the security company fixed the issue that caused us to look at this as a solution anyway. So we are no longer looking at this as a solution.