If all clients are watching the same video, then the biggest limitation is likely to be network bandwidth — how many 2Mbit/s streams can your Macs network connection support?
With interference, reception issues and traffic counted from the Mac to the router and then router to iPhone, an 802.11g connection is capable of around 4-8 streams. However, for most situations, the biggest limitation on the number of clients is likely to be CPU speed for encoding different streams. For clients watching different videos, the number is determined by CPU performance. In our testing a Quad Core 2.67Ghz Xeon can support approximately 6 simultaneous transcodes of 480p video in realtime and a 3.06 Ghz Core 2 Duo can support 3. Different CPUs with different numbers of cores will support relatively varying numbers of streams. Video with higher than 720p resolutions can pose heavy CPU burdens and may not be possible to transcode in realtime on slower CPUs. There is also significant overhead with some codecs — some files may be slower than others.
Related Questions
- If all clients are watching the same video, then the biggest limitation is likely to be network bandwidth — how many 2Mbit/s streams can your Macs network connection support?
- What are some of the bandwidth issues that must be considered when transporting video surveillance feeds over the IP network?
- What if the total bandwidth at the server isn enough to service all clients? Will they still be able to watch video?
