Blog posts tagged with 'rave'

Sit back and listen in as I speak with Doug Brown, Citrix Technology Professional and Microsoft MVP, about the Citrix Multimedia Virtualization Initiative and the new technologies being developed by the project Apollo team in this DABCC Radio podcast...

Derek Thorslund
Product Strategist, Multimedia Virtualization

Recently I published a video blog post about RAVE (Remote Audio & Video Extensions), the technology behind SpeedScreen Multimedia Acceleration. RAVE supports high quality playback of media streams that can be decoded by a media player that uses DirectShow or DirectX Media Objects (DMO). A question came in from the field asking how a customer can determine whether SpeedScreen Multimedia Acceleration is functioning. So here are some handy tips for verifying whether RAVE is working or not. In addition, you'll find a helpful troubleshooting article in our Knowledge Center.

The quick answer is that you can probably tell by the quality of the video playback since RAVE delivers a user experience on par with running the media player locally. But here are some other telltales. When RAVE is working, a black rectangle will quickly flash by as the video begins to play. Server CPU usage will be much lower than if the video were being rendered on the server (for comparison, you can disable SpeedScreen Multimedia Acceleration on the console and try playing the same video). Searching for "FilterInt" in ProcessExplorer will show that DLL loaded by the media player's process.

Are there any enhancements that you would like to see to make it easier to discover that an additional codec needs to be installed on the client (or even on the server to support server-side rendering as a fallback)? For example, one possible enhancement would be for SpeedScreen Multimedia Acceleration to record RAVE events in the Windows Event Log.

Derek Thorslund
Product Strategist, Multimedia Virtualization

In recent years, we've seen widespread adoption of video streaming in the enterprise. Typical uses include employee training and corporate communications. In this 10-minute video, Citrix engineer Aureliano Lopez-Martin demonstrates SpeedScreen Multimedia Acceleration and explains how Citrix's RAVE (Remote Audio & Video Extensions) technology delivers video streaming with excellent quality -- including High Definition -- and very high server scalability.

To set the stage, consider the two basic alternative approaches to delivering streaming media from a centralized application or desktop delivery system. You can either render the video centrally and send it in a standardized compressed format to the client, or you can decode the native compressed media stream on the client device using the appropriate codec. Each approach has advantages and disadvantages.

Recently, I posted a video of Vista Aero Remoting, a technology currently being developed under project Apollo. The Apollo Vista Aero Remoting technology takes a generic approach to delivering whatever appears on the user's virtual desktop. The beauty of that approach is that it delivers a "full fidelity" user experience for whatever the user needs to view on the screen, whether it is a Flash or Windows Media video, a next-generation Windows application written in WPF or Silverlight, or any other application technology.

The RAVE technology behind SpeedScreen Multimedia Acceleration is an optimization specifically for streaming video and audio. It leverages client-side resources to increase server scalability (the number of concurrent users) and thereby reduce the cost per user. Take a look at this video and you'll learn about the advantages and requirements of the RAVE approach and get a glimpse into the future of this innovative technology. 

Derek Thorslund
Product Strategist, Multimedia Virtualization

(Click to hear Aureliano Lopez-Martin explain the RAVE technology behind SpeedScreen Multimedia Acceleration)