Pipelight

plugin & pluginloader.exe: client/server setup?

Asked by Edgar Matzinger

LS,

  I wonder if it would be possible to set pipelight up in a client/server configuration.

What do I mean? Let's say I have a Raspberry Pi (RPi) and an Intel-based linux server running in my network. The RPi is connected to my TV and runs firefox with your plugin loaded. And pluginloader.exe runs, using wine, on the Intel-based linux server.

At the moment this is not possible, but is it something you would consider? And if so, how about making pluginloader.exe multisession? In that case, it would be possible that several clients use silverlight.

Thanks for your great work, kind regards, Edgar.

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Sebastian Lackner (slackner) said : 		#1

Hi,

the idea to let pluginloader.exe run on a different machine is nothing new. I also tried this approach shortly after one of the first Pipelight versions was released, and "in theory" its really possible.

My approach was to use NoMachine (NX) or direct SSH X forwarding to redirect the Xserver connection between the two machines, which indeed worked, but was very slow - and: I didn't find a good solution for sound yet, which also has to be redirected since the playback happens in pluginloader.exe. Embedding the plugin into the browser also didn't work, but this isn't really a big issue, and could be fixed later.

The steps to get all this working were not not really complicated - in fact it is sufficient to provide a "fake" wine executable, which for example creates a SSH connection, and runs the command there. Since SSH forwarding includes stdin & stdout the whole pluginloader communication isn't that hard to redirect.

The main problem in all of my tests was that the performance is just too bad - most people use Pipelight for video streaming services, and even with a relatively new CPU and graphic card the performance was horrible. When using non-streaming services it might probably be sufficient.

If you have some new ideas you want to test I can help you with creating all the required wrapper scripts. Making pluginloader.exe itself "streaming" compatible could probably bring some performance boost - but this could also lead to legal problems.

Regards,
Sebastian

BTW: Chromecasting the whole website already works with Pipelight when using the slower "linux windowlessmode" for rendering. But: It has some restrictions concerning the streaming resolution, it doesn't use GPU rendering, and the playback was really laggy...

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