Possible to have wine running on a seprate machine?

Hi,

i think it should be possible, but would require a lot of tricks (including patches on the source code), and i don't know if the performance is okay and if it works with all streaming sites (some DRM protected content will probably not work).

With our current version it is not possible yet for several reasons:
* The current approach is that the events are not redirected via pipe, but wine gets them directly from the xserver. This wouldn't be possible anymore when wine runs on a separate computer
* The video output is also managed by wine itself and not redirected, so there is no easy way to transmit it back to the browser.
* Embedding the plugin directly into the browser will most probably not work, or would require additional changes to the sourcecode.

I can imagine that the following scenario might work, but haven't tested myself yet:

By creating some custom scripts it would theoretically be possible to start Nomachine NX (or simple Xserver redirection, if it isn't too slow in the local network) to run wine on another machine. This will need some more changes to the config (like setting embed=false, providing scripts instead of the original wine executables, ...), but theoretically should work.

When I've some minutes time on the weekend I can probably create a small proof-of-concept, but I wouldn't expect the performance to be as good as running it natively.

Sebastian

Thanks for the reply to my ever hopeful question...

Very cool project though thanks have got netflix streaming on my mythbuntu box now :)

Hi,

I just tried my idea above and in principle it works. I created some bash scripts which tunnel the traffic between the browser and the remote machine running Wine. Unfortunately this has the following disadvantages:

* Its possible to use non-video Silverlight applications very well, but streaming is just too slow. I can only get approximately 15 FPS, which isn't really sufficient to watch smooth movies ;-) But it might be possible to increase this a bit further by tweaking the configuration.

* This solution would require some additional tricks to tunnel the audio data, so far only video data is transmitted

* It requires a really fast network link and on the server side (which runs Wine) a high CPU usage.

I will clean up my scripts a bit and make them available for download, but so far I would still recommend to use a local machine unless you want to use non-video Silverlight applications ;-)

Sebastian