On Thu, 2011-02-03 at 10:42 +0100, Erik Auerswald wrote: <snip>
I'd imagine there is no reason why something else besides NX could not be slotted into the wrappers in place of NX -- perhaps something that handled video and other large screen updates better.
This has been the biggest selling point of NX technology. The next best thing is said to be RDP, then come the more advanced VNC based projects. YMMV.
Indeed, NX runs rings around RDP. However, it fails miserably playing remote video and consumes lots of CPU when doing large screen updates.
Of course, the big question is what. HP has done some very interesting work with adaptive protocols, i.e., they adapt their compression algorithms to the needs of the video transfer. If I understand them correctly, they handle the streaming video problem not by spooling the file to the physical desktop and playing it locally like Citrix does but by adapting the algorithms used for transmitting the video. I do not believe they have open sourced the code.
Almost two years ago, Heinz forwarded me a link to a University project that was investigating more video friendly remote video protocols. <snip> One promising development is SPICE http://spice-space.org/ resp. http://www.redhat.com/virtualization/rhev/desktop/spice/ .
We looked at SPICE very seriously and are big RedHat fans however, at last look, it was primarily a LAN protocol and did not work well on lower bandwidth, WAN links.
Another new development (though the FAQ says it's only tested on high bandwidth links) is xpra http://code.google.com/p/partiwm/wiki/xpra . There is even a GUI app around it, winswitch http://winswitch.org/ .
What I tried with some kind of success across an analog modem link years ago was the Differential X Protocoll Compressor (dxpc) http://www.vigor.nu/dxpc/ . Just took a very quick look at this and it looks very interesting! Thanks for digging it out - John <snip>