Highspeed 'VNC'?

[aldo]

I currently use VNC on my iBook to use my PC downstairs. This is fine over a WiFi connection.

However, I'd like to be able to play games over it. It works fine, the keyboard and mouse commands work OK and I get the video ok. The problem is that the video comes through at around 0.1fps!

What I want to do is have a similar tool as VNC but it keeps a steady framerate of 15fps. I don't mind about loosing quality at all (640x480 is ok) but it must keep broadcasting the frames.

I would want to use WiFi for this but I doubt it's fast enough (11mbit/sec) so I will use my ethernet which is 100mbit throughout. This surely should be more than enough bandwidth. So does anyone know a solution for this?

 

[ExoticFish]

what you're asking is a far fetched idea. i'm sorry to say there's nothing out there now that can do what you ask.

 

[aldo]

Really.

I can already do it now, very messily, anyway.

Get a realmedia encoder, start it with the source as my computer desktop. Run VNC for keyboard and mouse control. Volia, run RealOne on my mac upstairs and VNC for keyboard and mouse.

It's not a far fetched idea and I'm sure if I had the knowledge i could hack the sourcecode of VNC.. all i need to make it do is use XViD instead of tile based encoding and force it to a frames per second...

 

[encro]

Have you tried using Microsoft RDC?

I'm not sure if you can get it to the level of control you require with a game but it can't hurt tryng anyway.

 

[ChrisH3677]

Citrix, Microsoft, VNC and others have been trying to solve your problem for years.

If you solve it - patent it, copyright it, coz you'll be rolling in the money if you do.

Just having a static bitmap (eg desktop wallpaper) can significantly degrade the performance of these remote type apps. Which is why many of them have an option to turn off the wallpaper on the host machine and also offer lesser color depth.

These things work by sending back to you only the area of the screen that has changed. No processing of the host is happening on your computer - it's simply a dumb terminal.

Therefore the more large areas of single colors on the host computer there are, the faster will be refreshes on your computer. So as you could imagine, anything with dynamic graphics - eg games or video - would be deathly slow, which is exactly what you are experiencing. That's why you get this weird effect sometimes where you "paint" the screen with little boxes of the host's screen, such as when it puts up a dialog box.

If you search the 'net I'm sure you'd have no trouble finding source code for VNC as it is a bit of a default standard for remote control and many people have produced their own versions - eg TightVNC, Chicken of the VNC etc etc.

good luck

 

[aldo]

It's a very simple solution, I mean TSN (www.tsncentral.com) (video games broadcaster, like ESPN is for football) has been broadcasting major matches of counterstrike for over a year, and the matches are a quite viewable at a bitrate of 100kbit/sec, so 5mbit/sec (average performance on my wifi connection) is actually around DVD rate, if not higher.

 

[ChrisH3677]

i'd imagine though the problem must be something to do with being interactive. Like, streaming has been around for yonks and works well on an adsl line.

But what you want to do is interactive. I reckon that's what makes it hard. Not sure why but as i said before, many have tried and failed already.

 

[killmoms]

The reason TV channels can do that is because they have the computers outputting their signal in an analog fashion via a TV-output which is then piped into the system and broadcast in that method. They're not trying to send raw digital bitmap data over a network line, they're sending analog video data over a broadcast network. Any "digitization" (i.e. digital cable and such) is done after the fact from the analog stream.

--Cless