On: Today I saw the future

[recuter]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onlive

"A web browser based demo service is also available for Windows PCs and Intel-based Macs running Mac OS X 10.5.8 or later enabling trials of games to be played without the need to download the OnLive Client."

So I guess this is like that only delivered "natively" without the need for a flash or silverlight plugin? Is that the big game changer? I'm a bit confused.

The most interesting part of the OP was the comment of how CPU work can remain local while the GPU work is offloaded to a remote GPU cloud. That is a very intriguing idea and smacks of Plan 9 a little.. however, I've been waiting for years for external Lightpeak GPUs to appear so little laptops could become gaming laptops when docked to it. But alas.

And yet here we have.. latency, on top of all the other problems. Somebody enlighten me.

[asdfs → recuter]

I believe OnLive uses Flash or some other plugin to stream content.

As far as I can tell, the breakthrough that OTOY is claiming is this:

- They've developed a new video compression format and implementation that provides better compression ratios than h.264 [which implementation?].

- Their new format can be encoded very efficiently using a GPU-based encoder.

- Their encoder is very low-latency.

- They have a decoder written in JavaScript that can run in the browser.

- Their decoder is very low-latency.

All the cloud/streaming/remote desktop stuff is somewhat ancillary to this.

[ZeroGravitas → asdfs]

Or possibly vice-versa: they appear to have been touting a desktop client app with remote rendering tech including a "codec" called orbx for a couple of years. So this could just be compiling the decoder via emscripten like Broadway and Route9 did for H.264 and VP8.

However, one of the Mozilla guys is quoted as saying it was built from the ground up for browsers (and the vague descriptions of the old codec, don't sound like a normal codec) so maybe they're just repurposing the name.