How to stream video of the desktop with good quality?

[kallekill]

I have played around with various cam software but I don't find one that fit my need. I want to capture my desktop and stream it over the Internet in real time with good quality. Some cam software can capture the desktop but they are all limited to bad codecs or low resolutions. The best software I tried was Microsofts Windows Media Encoder. With it I can choose the exact bitrate, resolution, framerate, codec and smoothness and I can capture the desktop. I even tried it while playing a game and it worked. The downside is that I get a delay of several seconds because all the buffering that has to be made.

Does anyone know of a program that can stream a video of the desktop in real time with good quality?

[JohnnyMalaria]

In WME, you can change the buffering time, though I must admit when I have tried to stream the desktop using WME, there seems to be much more of the delay than the buffer setting.

Of course, with a display set to 1200 x 1024 (as I have), that's a lot of data to convert to WMV and stream....

[kallekill]

In WME, you can change the buffering time, though I must admit when I have tried to stream the desktop using WME, there seems to be much more of the delay than the buffer setting.

Of course, with a display set to 1200 x 1024 (as I have), that's a lot of data to convert to WMV and stream....

I tried that and as you said, I still get a delay of about five seconds or more. I have also changed the buffering value in the player to the minimum of 1 second. I also run a resolution of 1280*960, but I changed the output resolution in WME to 800*600 to get better quality with my ADSL connection which is 1 Mbit.

I am looking into video conference programs right now and some claim to support HD resolutions. They seem very expensive though.

[wonkey_monkey]

Have you considered VNC? It has its drawbacks, like requiring the VNC viewer at each client, and there may be firewall problems, but you can configure the server to accept multiple clients (and make them view only).

David

[kallekill]

Have you considered VNC? It has its drawbacks, like requiring the VNC viewer at each client, and there may be firewall problems, but you can configure the server to accept multiple clients (and make them view only).

David

I think VNC will be too slow for my needs. I was going to stream a movie of the screen when I am playing a game. I think VNC uses compressed images like jpg and it will not be fast enough with moving images.

[wonkey_monkey]

I was going to stream a movie of the screen when I am playing a game.

Oh, yeah, that won't work :)

David

[kallekill]

I tried using VLC and it works pretty well. The delay is just a couple of seconds. It's not very fun to work with as you don't have an easy way of saving the settings and you don't have as many options as in WME but it works pretty well. The h264 codec I choose seems to eat alot of cpu and I don't know if it is possible to use it at a high framerate with high resolution even on a fast computer. There are other codecs though that don't look as good. I use tv-out from my video card that is connected to my tv card to capture the output. I had to do this to be be able to capture while playing a game.

[jggimi]

Moved to General Discussion per http://forum.doom9.org/announcement.php?f=10