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Comment by ur-whale | Hacker News Reader

> I could even watch a Youtube video through it.

Watching a Youtube video on remote X is rarely a problem, there's no latency involved.

Problem is horrible lags, and I mean just program working bad, not latency. I tried doing it with X11 now, and I gave up before I could even type "youtube" to address bar. Then I tried doing

  ssh -X remote firefox https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqZsoesa55w

and it wasn't better. I saw the new firefox window, but it stayed unresponsive.

And I bet part of the problem is due to Youtube (and browser generally) involving some non-trivial drawing technologies, rendering a video is not like showing a GTK interface.

Wat?

I guess GP meant input latency (since there's no input if you're just consuming a video stream).

Streaming is most sensitive to how much data you can push through the pipe in a given amount of time, not to how long it takes for a question/answer pair to travel between the server and the client.

Latency (how long it takes for messages to travel back and forth), which is where X11 over the network has major issue, doesn't matter in the specific case of watching a video.

Essentially, once you press 'play', there's just a torrent of data flowing down from the server to the client with very little need for two-way banter between the machines.

Yeah, no - X11 forwarding a video is at best "eh" when you're network local, and horrible otherwise. X11 forwarding burns a lot of bandwidth, and even when that bandwidth is available, going over TCP and SSH makes it implicitly quite latency sensitive.

It's not even fair to compare it to waypipe's h264 compressed buffer feeds.

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