Metaframe excels............
Tests show VideoFrame quality rivals other multimedia delivery methods.
BY CHARLES BRUNO
ITclarity, 07/03/00
Network professionals charged with delivering multimedia content over corporate networks should take note of two recent
tests by Tolly Research that show Citrix Systems's VideoFrame software delivers audio/video quality equal to or better than
alternative delivery methods.
The reports, released this month in ITclarity, paint a very promising picture for VideoFrame use within the Citrix MetaFrame
thin-client environment. In one set of tests, Tolly Researchers found that encoding times and disk storage requirements for
VideoFrame are comparable to those of MPEG-1 encoders tested. At certain playback rates, such as 128K bit/sec and
1,024K bit/sec, VideoFrame actually outperformed the MPEG-1 encoder tested.
Testing also showed that there were clear distinctions in playback video quality between the VideoFrame software and the
MPEG-1 encoder tested. VideoFrame-encoded AVI files sacrificed the motion quality of a video clip as compression levels
increased, but preserved the still-image and audio quality. By contrast, MPEG-1 streams retained full-motion transitions from
a source stream, but exhibited degradation in the still images.
In another set of tests, the Citrix multimedia software was tested for its capability to deliver multimedia clips over a streaming
channel. Alternatively, testers evaluated VideoFrame's performance against delivery of the same multimedia files over a
Windows network, and separately via an HTTP connection.
Findings show more efficient CPU utilization for VideoFrame than any of the approaches tested, and VideoFrame consumes
less bandwidth than either the Windows network or HTTP delivery methods. More importantly, VideoFrame enables
multimedia delivery in the MetaFrame environment, which is extremely impractical (if not impossible) using MetaFrame's
native ICA protocol without VideoFrame.
Kevin Flood, chief technology officer at Tolly Research, which publishes the ITclarity subscription research product, adds,
"Any MetaFrame shop that needs to support multimedia in that environment should run VideoFrame, too. It's a win-win
since it is less taxing on the server and it consumes less bandwidth than any of the alternative approaches." |
