A possible solution for remote screen capture

[Network21]

I have successfully used Real VNC to remotely control radio stations' automation software, to take over a show or to stand in for a late of missing DJ. This has been done in tandem with sending my voice via skype, web steam, or telephone - literally phoning it in..

The latency when connecting across the country has been very low, often a second or less, so should be even better for use with VB on a local network.

If the remote video is set up on an i7, which has an on-chip embedded VNC server, and the VB machine has a copy of Real VNC Viewer, Viewer Plus, or any similar app the quality should be high and the latency low. -Unfortunately, not having built an i7 machine to test this on I cannot report on the embedded VNC server so someone else will have to test that.-

On other / older machines the server app uses very little resources so shouldn't have a significant impact on performance.

The viewer and server work in many modes & resolutions (implementing extended and multi desktop well) which include with/without remote sound so this could be used if a multi-channel sound card or mixing desk aren't in a studio setup.

If the viewer could be implemented directly into the capture module then that would be one possible solution.

The documentation for Real VNC Viewer includes:

"Running from a web browser

The VNC servers also contain a small web server. If you connect to this with a web browser, you can download the Java version of the viewer, and use this to view the server. You can then see your desktop from any Java-capable browser, unless you are using a proxy to connect to the web. The server listens for HTTP connections on port 5800+display number. So to view display 2 on machine ’snoopy’, you would point your web browser at:

h**p://snoopy:5802/

The applet will prompt you for your password, and should then display the desktop.

Running as an application

You can run the viewer outside a browser using, for example:

java -jar vncviewer snoopy:2

The precise command line will depend on your particular Java installation."

Using this will reduce the resource use on the VB machine to absolute minimum.

If this 'web server' is also included in the embedded VNC on an i7 chip then there is no need for an extra server/capture application..

VNC Screen Shot
http://www.realvnc.com/products/viewerplus/1.1/docs/VNC_Viewer_Plus_Connected.png
A. Desktop of a client computer running Windows XP. B. VNC Viewer Plus displaying the desktop of a host computer.

[ssmyth]

Great idea Andy!

I have two i7 machines here... will have to test.

Mike can this be brought into a module today?

[Sinc747]

Wow!

Good work!

Await Stephen's testing.

- Tom

[Network21]

Further study and research today has shown that many new workstation / server motherboards are being produced with on-board or option ethernet KVMs which include video redirect.

These boards include several from Asus which have the ASMB3-IKVM, an internal hardware card add-on, which is accessed via web browser or remote console app.

[Mike]

Frankly I do not understand this post, nor why Tom and Stephen are so excited about it. From what little I know about VNC is that it is rather complicated to set up and has poor compression if a lot of the desktop changes (e.g. video). A simple screen capture program with a good compressor would do better and be a lot easier to install (just copy & run). I admit that a VNC server built into a CPU would be great IF it had a good compressor and IF that compressor would not eat CPU cycles (which would be weird being built into the CPU). But I have not been able to find any documentation about this at all. Am I missing something? Where did you read about this built-in VNC server?

[Network21]

I think that Tom and Stephen can see that for anything short of full motion video a VNC server-client setup is a good, low resource setup for getting video redirected from a remote machine.

I experimented with this yesterday on my internal network and was able to send reasonable quality and speed video at up to 640x480, a video file from my NAS running on a MacBook then picked up by a PC in another studio, but any higher started to head towards looking like a flipbook. Keynote / Powerpoint was near perfect. This still needs more experimentation / work but is a usable solution until Vidblaster's version of iVGA has been written.

I have never had much trouble with setting up or running VNC on any system but I have mostly been using RealVNC which is an excellent package and no more complex than the average game server to configure. I have found then extremely useful for 'phoning it in' on radio shows but also for many other tasks as both a tech and as a programme director & station manager.

The data on the on-chip VNC servers came from the http://www.realvnc.com/products/viewerplus/index.html"]RealVNC (http://"[url) website[/url], from Intel's pages on the i5 & i7 family of CPUs, and from the Asus website.

[Mike]

Doesn't look very interesting to me. I get the idea it's just a port to the graphics memory, no fancy compressor or anything, it is only supported on specific chips, and you must be using on-board graphics.