The VideoLAN Forums

So I am trying to stream my desktop but cannot get the quality to be acceptable. It looks like, by default, VLC uses the RV15 codec for the desktop capture. This looks pretty good when playing locally but looks horrible when transcoded into a streaming format (at least with the transcoding settings I have tried). Does anyone have any idea how to get this to look good? I need to send this using a unicast stream since this will end up going to a multicast address.

VLC does not configure the capture bits depth. It comes from the operating system. I get 24-bits here.

Rémi,

So the actual capture looks great (when playing locally). Based on your comment it appears that the integer in the codec name reflects the bit depth. Today, for whatever reason, the same computer is showing 32 bits (RV32). This is a Windows 7 machine.

My question lies more specifically with transcoding and streaming of the desktop capture. The only codec that ever gets a picture on the other end (using RTP) is MPEG-2 but it looks horrible, no matter how high the bitrate (mainly because it is MPEG-2). I can get other codecs to display locally when transcoded. H.264 looks good enough when displayed locally. But I can't get it to stream (I also get a lot of errors when displaying locally).

In short, this is what I need to do:

1. Capture Desktop
2. Stream desktop to a set top box via multicast (STB supports TS and the following codecs: MPEG-2 MP@HL, MPEG-4 pt10 AVC/H.264 HP@L4)

Any ideas on how to do this and make it look good with an ~1-2 mb/s stream on a Windows box?