Choppy Desktop Capture

[geogauci]

Hi!
I've been trying to capture the Desktop and stream it over wifi in real-time. The problem is that even when I play locally the captured video stream in real-time, playback is very choppy; playback seems to be around 2fps! Currently I'm using Windows XP; playback on Linux running on a VM is much smoother, but I need to capture video from Windows.
Settings used:
frame rate: 10fps - 24 fps
encapsulation: ASF
Video codec: MPEG4/Theora/divX3
Bitrate: 1200-2000kb/s
resolution: 512x384

Any combination of the above settings yielded the same results!

Hardware resources are not an issue (I'm using a high-end PC, and CPU usage is very low). Any ideas? Can I even hope for smooth streaming of a windows desktop?

[warrick]

Hello,

Maybe this is surprising but afer a lot of tries, I use a my webcam to stream my desktop. The webcam gave me an 30fps real-time image.

Kind Regards,
Jose.

[geogauci]

Well, the end result should include a (small) number of virtual machines, all of them streaming video using vlc, so I can't use the webcam solution in this case

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

--screen-fps value?

[geogauci]

What do you mean? Under windows I am achieving very low frame rates (visibly obvious, but not measured), whatever the frames per second set in VLC. I tried reducing the screen resolution to 800*600(minimum) and scale the output to 0.5 but the result was always the same. The monitor refresh rate is set to 60Hz. I even tried to lower the Colour quality to 16bit; the colours in the VLC desktop capture become messed up, but playback is still choppy....