[osg-users] Synchronized movie playing across the network

[OpenSceneGraph Users]

All,

I need to synchronize movie playback among multiple machines across the
network in my OpenSceneGraph application. I'd like to try to use the same
style of synchronization that mplayer uses. This involves one instance
acting as a master timer and the other instances (all running on different
machines) acting as clients. The master sends a network broadcast at
regular intervals telling the clients which is the next frame and when to
switch to it. The time to switch can either be done as an absolute time
(which implies that all of the clocks on the network machines are already
synchronized) or a time relative to the beginning of the movie, or perhaps
even a frame number. The clients may be playing the same movie, but more
often they will be playing small pieces of a larger movie.

I'd like to leverage the OSG plugins (particularly ffmpeg) as much as
possible, so I'm thinking of modifying the ImageStream class to enable this
type of synchronization, so that any ImageStream can utilize it if desired.

Does this sound useful to other developers? Does something like this
already exist? I'd be interested in sharing ideas and code, with the
understanding that everything developed gets back into the source OSG
distribution. For starters, I'm interested in how current applications do
synchronization across different machines, such as in a cluster. I think
that there are mechanisms in OSG to do things like this, but I'm not
familiar with them. Pointers are appreciated. Thanks!

Eric
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