[MPlayer-users] Synchronised Playback

[Paul Strickland]

Hi there, I'm new to the group, and not too familiar with Mplayer, so please
bear with me.



I'm trying to play 3 videos in sync across networked Windows 10 Pcs, which
will ultimately be projected side by side. For those old enough to remember,
it's like a primitive version of Cinerama. Obviously, synchronisation is
critical, so I'm trying to do as much as possible to ensure that the videos
stay together. Unfortunately I don't have the budget to buy/rent 3 identical
PCs and projectors, so the videos are being played on a mix of different
equipment.



I've set up and trialled Mplayer using the -udp-master and -udp-slave
functions, and the results have been good, but not quite good enough. The
three videos drift apart by a few milliseconds, and then re-sync, which is
enough to make it look pretty clunky. To help keep things consistent, I've
already taken a number of practical steps.



.         The videos are the same length, about 45 minutes

.         Videos are not highly compressed, each being approx. 11GB

.         They are encoded and assembled using the same tools, codecs,
settings etc. (in fact, over 50% of the videos are identical, from the same
source).

.         PCs are on a wired Gigabit network

.         Windows 10 builds are the same

.         Videos are all stored on each PCs C drive, on SSD



Does anyone have any experience of doing anything similar, or have any ideas
how I might improve things. Apart from the -udp settings, I've just let
Mplayer run as standard, and I know there is a huge amount of tweaking I
could try.



Many thanks



Paul