access remote video from program

Question

Hello everyone,

I want to have a stress/performance testing for my content management site, especially for hosted streamed video part. I am using IIS to host the videos. More specifically, I am using the new Windows Server 2008 x64 and IIS 7.0.

The confusion is,

1. I plan to write code to start a lot of threads, and in each thread I will send web request to video URL, and read response stream from server, but I am not sure whether in this way, it behaves the same as a real user using player to render the video (in my code, I just read the stream, without really play it or write to anywhere). I want to test similar to the real scenario as much as possible;

2. I also plan to use real Media Player to render video (or what-so-ever media player), but my concern is if I start multiple Media Players on my test machine, since Media Player will utilize some H/W or some other resources (video card specific memory?) to decode/render the video (not sure, needs guru help to check and confirm), if I start multiple players, are there any potential H/W or resource contention between the players? If there is contention, it is also not actual ens user scenario, i.e. few user will start 100 players on his/her machine. :-)

Does anyone have any advice to me?

BTW: I prefer to use any .Net based solution, but not a must.

thanks in advance, George

Answer 1

You should use mplayer. It has a lot of command line options. I don't know how all theses options are available under Windows, but under linux something like this is possible :

mplayer some_url -dump-video -dump-file=some_file

It will behave the same as a "normal" player I think, and your test machine won't need to handle hundreds of decompression thread, sot it fits your need 1 and 2