Qualified video delivery

摘要

A video server is configured to provide streaming video to players of computer games over a computing network. The video server can provided video of different games to different players simultaneously. This is accomplished by rendering several video streams in parallel using a single GPU. The output of the GPU is provided to graphics processing pipelines that are each associated with a specific client/player and are dynamically allocated as needed. A client qualifier may be used to assure that only clients capable of presenting the streaming video to a player at a minimum level of quality receive the video stream.

主权项

1. A video server system having a processor for executing program instructions stored in a memory to provide, comprising:
a client qualifier configured to remotely determine if a client is qualified to receive a video stream configured for display on the client in response to a received request to access a selected video game, the qualification being based on abilities of the client to receive and display the video stream at least at a minimum level of quality; a monitor configured to assign clients to particular ones of a plurality of video sources, the assignment being made in part based on test results gathered by the client qualifier that confirms the minimum level of quality for the video stream and whether the video source is provisioned with game logic for the selected video game, wherein each video source includes, virtual machines for the provisioned game logic; virtual drivers associated with the virtual machines; a non-virtual driver executed on a hardware graphical processing unit (GPU); a shared memory; the non-virtual driver is configured for receiving one or more video streams in parallel from the virtual drivers, the hardware GPU is configured for producing video frames, wherein each virtual driver is configured to manage transfer of a respective video stream to the non-virtual driver and manage transfer of video frames for the respective video stream to the shared memory; an encoder for encoding the video frames, the encoder is defined by one or more dynamic encoding pipelines (DEPs), and each DEP performs the encoding using an H.264 protocol, wherein video frames produced for each virtual driver are processed by a respective DEP having access to the shared memory; and an I/O device configured for communicating encoded video streams to the client via a communication network.