ThinLinc webcam prototype

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I’m happy to share a bit of what’s going on behind the scenes here at Cendio. We now have a first working prototype of webcam support in ThinLinc:

4032×3024 2.16 MB

We know that this is a feature that has been requested by many users. E.g. in the thread How To: Get USB cameras working through thinlinc, or Video forwarding. We’ve also tracked this in our bugzilla for a long time.

This project is done in collaboration with one of our ThinLinc customers, who are co-financing this development with Cendio.

If everything goes well, this will be included in ThinLinc 4.22.0 at the end of this year. At that point, it will work as smoothly as all other features in ThinLinc, and on all platforms. Users will simply need to click a box in the client to share their camera.

Our goal is to have no need for manual configuration on the server, no extra kernel modules, or any such magic that might disrupt stability or compatibility.

Stay tuned as we’ll share more updates on how this project progresses.

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Hi Pierre, this is really great news since there are certainly many ThinLinc users out there patiently waiting for such a general solution or even have worked on some own workarounds here. In fact, here we have implemented a kinda hybrid solution in our own thinRoot OS driven Thinclient environment. Our users can (if they require some webcam/video) quickly disconnect their session and re-connect via ThinLinc in windowed mode and then use the Linux environment in the thinRoot ThinClient OS to start common video conferencing connections via a local chrome oder zoom client in the ThinClient and then interact (e.g. screen share) like this with with their ThinLinc session.

But it would of course be better to have a native webcam support in ThinLinc to route the video signal from a webcam transparently into the ThinLinc session. However, can you perhaps already share some more technical details on the actual solution you are about to implement (h264 streaming or direct ip-based USB forwarding?) since I fear that in case 20-30 users would start a webcam session in their ThinLinc session, the bandwith of the underlying server would quickly be exhausted if the video signal forwarding would just transparently forward the signal to the server.

So some more technical details in advance would be great! Thanks!

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Hi @j.maus,

Thank you for your response!

Sending the raw, uncompressed, USB data stream has been out of the question since day one of this project based on those exact bandwidth concerns you raise. As far as I’m aware, we are yet to decide on a codec to use for the network transport. Regardless, we are well aware of the fact that a handful of uncompressed camera streams will easily saturate a 1GbE NIC and will have that solved before release :slight_smile:

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