Intentionally streaming at less than 1 FPS

[rfunches]

I am streaming video only from a Windows desktop to a Mac laptop using VLC on both ends. The streaming works fine through the GUI settings - HTTP, MPEG encoding, etc.

Where I am running into an issue is the frame rate. I can get the desktop video to transcode at 1 frame per second (FPS) without issue. However, I can't get it to go below 1 FPS -- for instance, 0.5 or 0.1 FPS appears the same as 1 FPS. I am ultimately trying to get the video to transcode at 2 or 3 seconds per frame.

I know that this question/problem is completely counterintuitive, but yes, I am asking to slow down the framerate to a really slow amount, multiple seconds per frame. Yes, it will be very jumpy and a huge amount of frames will be dropped -- that is exactly what I want. And I can't accomplish this through slow playback speed, because this is a live video stream and <1.0x playback speed means you won't be watching in real-time.

Is this some sort of bug or technical limitation when defining FPS below 1.0, or am I missing a setting somewhere?

[rfunches]

To clarify, I can do this successfully in ffmpeg:

Code: Select all

ffmpeg -i examplevideo.mp4 -r 0.25 examplevideo_slow.mp4

which yields a video playing one frame every 4 seconds.

Not sure why the frame rate setting in the Streaming option window doesn't seem to allow a frame rate below 1.

As I mentioned before, I'm trying to troubleshoot the specific technical issue of <1 fps for streaming. Someone provided well-intentioned advice saying that this is not good for the viewer, it will result in an extremely difficult video to watch, etc. I appreciate raising those concerns but they are not relevant to what I'm asking for.