Hardcore info about how sound is excuted in ICA!

[chjinmind]

Hi!
I need some hardcore info about how sound is processed on a MetaFrame server through to the ICA-client.

Is the sound request first "processed" and compressed on the server (in what way, other than "ICA", more precise) and the sent to the client?
Is some usual wav-codec first called and then some comprimising process started or how is the soundprocess done on the server?
What executable (on the clients) is using the citrix audio codecs on the clients (ctxadpcm.acm)?

When I play 2 sounds simultaneously on the server via the ICA-client I noticed that the client buffers the second sound and plays it after the first sound is finished, how big/long is that buffer? eg. can i play a whole cd and expect the second sound to be played thereafter?
(stupid example but to get the idea...)


(Anyone noticed that it's pretty tricky to get Winamp to work as a published app playing mp3-files?)

Keep it up all!

Best regards,
Chris

 

[CitrixEngineer]

Very interesting question - you'd probably have to get someone from Citrix to explain this. Have you joined the CDN (Citrix Developer Network)?

I couldn't find anything on CDN, but here is a quick guess based on experience, FWIW.

Citrix says that ALL processing except keyboard, mouse and display updates are done on the server. ALL traffic is sent over ICA and compressed at the server, if the client requests compressed data. The client also determines what quality audio it receives (low, medium, high), and the bandwidths are well documented.

I'd guess that wfica.exe is using the audio codec to determine the quality of sound that has been selected within the client - and little else.

The buffer is probably nothing more than the client cache - from what I've seen, just about everything gets thrown into the client cache . Therefore, if you've set the cache to a high setting, the client will probably buffer a large quantity of audio data. Again, I suspect that this is limited when you set the sound quality in the client.

ICA is not really designed for streaming audio or video - Citrix make (made?) a product called VideoFrame, which handle(d?) streaming media, but I haven't seen any updates to it. To get good quality audio over ICA you'd need some fairly serious bandwidth - and a quiet network

Sorry I can't be a bit more "hardcore", but, as you've probably noticed, Citrix seem as ready as Microsoft to give out low-level information.

If you find out any more, post back - this is an interesting topic, and relevant to public internet/library applications, amongst others.

Good Luck!