![]() The Modeline used in this config file creates a monitor that runs with a refresh rate of exactly 60 Hz. The X-server requires a config file in /etc/X11/nf that should have the following content. First, the repository is updated, the video dummy driver and X-server system is installed, and a new user is created to be used in the GUI as follows: apt update If you have any idea why, please leave a comment.Īnd here is the sequence of package installs in the VM that brings the system to life. I made the same experience with my other VNC based cloud GUI solutions. One strange thing: The setup described below will only work with their Intel based VMs, while the X-server stubbornly refuses to work in their AMD based VMs. Yes, that’s not a small VM, but at around €35 a month or around €1 a day, quite affordable. I scaled it up and down a bit to see how many vCPUs I need, and came up with 8 vCPUs for 1920x1080p streaming and recording with BBB running in a browser. In my case, I got a VM at Hetzner for the purpose. O.k., long story short, here’s how the VM has to be set-up to make this work. ![]() And that was the final piece of the puzzle Once that simulated monitor ran at a refresh rate 60 Hz, OBS suddenly produced sharp and crisp recordings of video content, e.g. After a good night’s sleep, however, I had the idea to see if I could get the refresh rate of the simulated screen that is attached to the simulated graphics card to exactly 60 Hz, so OBS could record at 30 Hz exactly. While OBS would take great videos of non-video content like scrolling through web pages, recording of video content did not look quite right. Ah! And with this approach I could get OBS running in the cloud in a virtual machine without a real graphics card. ![]() And this X-server and driver combination combines OpenGL Mesa support in software. And on top, it comes with an X-server graphics driver called “xserver-xorg-video-dummy”. Linux ships with a number of graphics card drivers, such as for example for Intel, Nvidia or AMD graphics chips. The problem as I understand it is that OBS requires OpenGL Mesa support of the X-server which xvfb and X2Go do not seem to provide.īut then I noticed that there is yet another approach to running a Linux X-Server and window system in a virtual machine: By simulating a graphics card and screen instead of ‘just’ a virtual frame buffer. A bit of research on the Internet also didn’t get me anywhere. I also tried to get it working with other solutions such as X2Go but that also didn’t work. Unfortunately, OBS is not on good terms with the x virtual frame buffer (xvfb) package that is the basis of my ‘GUI in the cloud’ solution. That’s not quite the typical use of a VM in the cloud but I have found quite a number of good uses for it over the past year. The fix for both problems is to put OBS for recording and streaming the screen into a virtual machine in a data center. That meant that I had to run the streaming on my own for two days and became I and my Internet connectivity became the single point of failure. And the second thing I didn’t like was that the notebook was physically located at my place. For the final publication of the video, the material was upscaled to 1080p again. ![]() So we settled for streaming at 1920x1080p and recording at 1280x720p. And even though the notebook was relatively new, the mobile Core i5 processor could not run BBB in the browser with OBS recording at full-HD resolution and streaming at the same time. While running OBS on a physical notebook worked great, I felt that there are two areas in which we could improve this year: Running a BBB client in the browser with video streams, and OBS for recording and streaming at the same time takes quite some processing power. Pretty high on my list: Virtualize that notebook with OBS on it and push it out into a virtual machine in the cloud. So it was time to think a bit about how to improve last year’s setup. And it looks like we are going to have at least a part of this year’s event in the cloud again. The live streams of the talks, however, ran on a physical notebook and we used OBS Studio to record the screen of that notebook and stream it to to the CCC distribution network. in a datacenter) to host the BBB video conference servers. For this, we used quite a number of virtual machines in the cloud (i.e. In 2020, the Vintage Computing Festival had to happen online.
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