MultiStream A Cross-Platform Display Sharing System Using Multiple Video Streams

For collaboration, cross-platform sharing of display content amongst desktop, laptop, handheld computers and smart phones is needed. Due to architectural and performance differences, support for sharing of display content is complex and the performance is low. By using standard media players and video stream formats we reduce or avoid several of these complexities and performance bottlenecks. We do continuous video encoding of display content, and a video server processes and distributes customized or fixed rate videos to viewers. We report on a configuration encoding a video of the display content of a laptop, streaming it to the video server, and playing it back on up to 560 clients distributed over 28 computers. The video displays on a wall-sized high-resolution tiled display. FPS is reduced by 2/3 on the laptop, but the bandwidth usage is reduced by two orders of magnitude. The CPU load on the server is below 50%.