Kuiper: Jean-Baptiste Kempf hunts in the shadow lands with his new project

Even if he cannot take over the shadow service of which he was artistic director for a brief period – and it was Octave Klapa who won – Jean-Baptiste Kempf remains very invested in Cloud gaming. The head of VideoLAN recently unveiled Kyber, an ultra-low latency two-way broadcast technology.

This new solution is ambitious and interesting in several respects. For starters, it's open source and cross-platform. “Unlike shadow, it is soft.”“, explains Jean-Baptiste Kempf in his presentation at Paris VideoTech in mid-December.

On the server side, Kyber relies on FFmpeg, a basic video encoder that supports all major codecs. On the client side, it's a stripped-down version of VLC that serves as a foundation. The link between the two is provided by the new transport protocol This is c.

This free and proven foundation allows Kyber to work on all platforms: Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, and even in a web browser. There is no doubt that there is an application that can be used directly by the general public; Kyber should take the form of a software development kit (SDK) that can be integrated into other software. Why no shadow?

According to the demonstration videos, the technology allows, at best, only one or two to be obtained tires of delay between client (e.g. Android smartphone) and server (e.g. Mac), allowing difficult titles to play correctly. In milliseconds, the developer and his team measured latency of 16ms with a 60Hz display or 10ms with a 240Hz display.

According to Jean-Baptiste Kempf, for remote access to a computer in Parsec, Kyber could be suitable from the beginning of the year. For more advanced uses, such as controlling drones, you will have to wait several months. The expected improvements seem to be more about video quality (reduced artifacts, better management of blur effect, potential support for HDR, etc.) than response time. The project has not been officially launched yet. His website Empty at the moment.