Gate One Will Support X11: Fast Enough To Run VLC In Your Browser

Riskable writes "Ever seen a remote desktop tool that's fast/efficient enough to play back video? Gate One will soon have that capability via the forthcoming X11 support (as demonstrated in the video). I am posting this to Slashdot looking for suggestions and feedback as to how I should move forward with it before I solidify the architecture, API, and even the business end of it (making money). I'll be watching the thread and replying to comments (as I have time). Also, if you're interested you can sign up to be notified when it's available." We've posted a few stories about Gate One previously.

Comments

F/OSS

[Anonymous Coward]

...and even the business end of it (making money).

Well, you just release the source and documentation; then hire yourself out as a consultant and the money will just come in! You can also write O'Reilly books on your software. We all know that O'Reilly authors are all 1%'ers with their private jets and everything.

Re:F/OSS

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent up.

Re:F/OSS

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent up, mod grandparent down.

Re:F/OSS

[Anonymous Coward]

i actually met Tim a long time ago at a software/book thing in Monterey, Calif.; he was quite nice to me, and despite my current books being published by another house, gave me a few lines in the venue (it was his gig, IIRC, and because of this, later on when one of his later authors, [cough] David Pogue, lifting one of my pieces of software illegally for inclusion in his Palm Pilot book, i never busted his chops about it); oh, and i also met Larry Wall and other F/OSS software giants at the same venue - every one of them was a gentleman...

Re:F/OSS

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent left, mod grandparent right and grand grand parent counter clockwise.

Re:F/OSS

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Also, erect the OP.

Re:F/OSS

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what she said.

Re:F/OSS

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent Up-Up-Down-Down-Left-Right-Left-Right B, A, Start

Re:F/OSS

[Lightning McQueen]

Say what you will, OP is correct. All the open source projects are super wealthy with all the honest users donating like they should. Users wouldn't think of just using a product without compensating for it. Would they?

Re:F/OSS

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't that the point of it?

Re:F/OSS

[Anonymous Coward]

That made me laugh ;) Thanks!

Re:F/OSS

[TWX]

Mod parent left, mod grandparent right and grand grand parent counter clockwise.

Put your hands on your hips, and pull your knees in tiiiIIIIiiiight!

Give a man a programming environment

[Anonymous Coward]

Give a man a programming environment of sufficient power and he will port everything.

The network says no

[girlintraining]

Look, the protocol could be the greatest thing since sliced bread. It could have free orgasms built into it. It might even have the cure for cancer.

But it can't overcome latency, or shannon's law regarding just how much data you can shove over a given network link. You can cheat by using lossful compression, you can employ predictive algorithms, but at the end of the day it'll only be as good as the network lets it. That's why there haven't been any big advancements in this area: There's none to make. Remote desktop will be varying degrees of shitty for the forseeable future, because our network links are shit. ISPs purposefully sabotage remote desktop and VPN because it's a threat to their business model. You can't "protocol" that away. Believe me, people have tried.

At best, we'll be able to trade one variety of crap for another, but remote desktop will never come close to the experience of actually using the computer at the same location. Human beings start to notice lag between their own actions and computer responses in as little as 50ms. The network links typically take longer than that to send the data. Especially over wifi.

Re:The network says no

[Anonymous Coward]

If I can stream 1080p from youtube why is it implausible in an RDP session as long as the remote node has the bandwidth?

Re:The network says no

[Bill_the_Engineer]

I think the minor detail that was lost in the slashvertisement was that gate one eliminated the need for remote desktop software by being browser based and its performance is at least comparable to other remote desktop software.

In addition, the author is offering to add X terminal emulation as a feature.

I don't think he meant to pass it off as the fastest possible protocol out there.

Re:The network says no

[postbigbang]

The link layer is always the foot on the garden hose. Teradici's PCoIP and Ericom's protocol set are fast enough to play reasonable video on. Citrix, a bit slower, and on a good day, 10GB network, no traffic, gusty wind, xRDP will do it.

So fie on your "crap". Once you cure the link layer, several work just fine. Maybe this one, too, although there's always room for competition.

Re:The network says no

[H0p313ss]

This. My kingdom for a mod point.

Re:The network says no

[i kan reed]

Please. A screen only has so many pixels, and you only have so much input. The main UI paradigms primarily in use today were initially developed so far back that the original hardware was several orders of magnitude slower than the network bandwidth we have today. It's true that piping 4k images in real time eats a ton of bandwidth, but high display resolution is pretty much the only network hurdle. Every other UI behavior can operate in human-sense realtime.

Re:The network says no

[h4rr4r]

50ms is a long time.
Remote does not mean not on the same LAN.

Re:The network says no

[X0563511]

Because it took 2 hours to encode that 1080p video, and that's an awful lot of latency.

Re:The network says no

[h4rr4r]

Because youtube is not interactive.
This means it can cache to get to 1080p and that temporary slowdowns are of no concern. With RDP/X11/SPICE you have to have an interactive connection. That means anything you do to get a smoother desktop like caching ends up making the interaction slower.

Re:The network says no

[Octorian]

Latency... Latency.... Latency...

When you're streaming 1080p video, its fine to have a buffer several seconds or minutes long to cover any hicups on the network. For remote desktop use, not so much.

Re:The network says no

[h4rr4r]

Sadly the speed of light as not improved one bit since those days. That means once you get far enough away the delay will be clear as day to even the slowest human.

Re:The network says no

[Lothsahn]

We talking VNC or RDP? Whether RDP can be significantly improved--I don't know. However, I also find it happens to work very well, even across large distances. There is some lag, but very manageable with US-based ISP's. If you have a low latency, high bandwidth network, thin clients work just like a local desktop to any normal human being for word and web-browsing.

VNC, on the other hand, does not work this way. Despite having very low latency and high bandwidth, my VNC connection from just inside my house is terrible. There's significant lag and other problems. Across wide network links? It's horribly painful to use.

I'm not sure if you were describing the state of RDP or VNC, but given the article is about VNC, there's a tremendous amount of improvement that is possible in that protocol. RDP demonstrates this. We should realize this and make VNC closer (or better) than RDP.

Re:The network says no

[Anonymous Coward]

you sir have won this thread. cheers to you.

Re:The network says no

[Russ1642]

You can stream 1080 over YouTube? I've... buffering... never... buffering... been... buffering... successful... buffering... at it.

Re:The network says no

[i kan reed]

I'll worry about that when my data-center is on Mars.

Re:The network says no

[SJHillman]

I don't know... most of our RDP users where I work just do the same thing over and over... you could probably buffer their actions.

Re:The network says no

[Nerdfest]

That however is not time that is network limited as the GP posted. There's still room for optimization is desktop transfer protocols.

Re:The network says no

[wulfhere]

Agreed. 50ms is long enough to get from Chicago to NY, TWICE, on fiber (and not using the special low-latency routes). I don't need it to be exactly like sitting at the workstation, I'm just looking for it to be USABLE, unlike Citrix connections that drop anytime someone sneezes at a NOC somewhere.

Re:The network says no

[smash]

uh what? my 2007 spec machine sitting in the corner doing nothing because it has been replaced, can transcode video in better than real time.

Re:The network says no

[Riskable]

You're right: It doesn't need any proprietary software or proprietary protocols. It "just works" (in your browser).

I honestly have no idea if it's the fastest protocol. I do know that it's an order of magnitude less bandwidth than noVNC and similar web-based remote desktop products.

Re:The network says no

[MozeeToby]

If you have an otherwise decent connection you should be able to play 1080p just fine. If you can't, your ISP is probably sending the traffic to one of the massively overloaded mirrors they run. You can block them easily by following the directions here for Linix or here for Windows. Or you can apply the same rules at your router to take care of the issue for your whole network.

Re:The network says no

[drakaan]

Ask anyone who plays multiplayer online games.

You can buffer non-interactive streams to cover up the shitty, jittery, laggy network users are using to view video. Interactive content, however, requires that intermediate routing devices hand off traffic to the next hop as close to immediately as possible.

AT&T (U-verse...my current connection) offers plenty of speed (roughly 20MB down/10 up), but most of the testing tools I've used show me with ping times of somewhere between 40 and 100 ms, depending on where I test. That makes youtube work fine, and CoD: Ghosts/Black Ops[2]/Halo/Happy Wars/etc become frustratingly unresponsive at times.

Re:The network says no

[tramp]

VNC is terrible on both LAN and WAN but SPICE is a lot better and on par with RDP in my experience. And imo there are plenty opportunities to improve both but it is hard work and not many interested.

Re:The network says no

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not entirely accurate; you are correct in theory but explain how Microsoft is doing it with RDP - RemoteFX? How about services like Splashtop are able to function?

Fact is, you can stream video even 1080p content over somewhat latent networks, it's being done now with a few different products. So there's no reason why this protocol couldn't over come these limitations in some similar manner as RemoteFX in RDP is doing it.

Re:The network says no

[Russ1642]

Thanks. I'll give it a try sometime.

Re:The network says no

[Riskable]

I hear what you're saying and I agree that network latency is one of the biggest problems. Having said that, I have performed testing with my home Comcast Internet connection with Gate One running on a Rackspace cloud instance (512MB). The latency is negligible. My ping time to that server was a pretty steady ~50ms and apps like Chrome (yes, Chrome inside Chrome), LibreOffice (Calc/Writer), Sublime Text 2, kate, etc worked very well.

Re:The network says no

[hobarrera]

Latency, not bandwidth. A round trip takes too long, and each click/keypress is (at least) one round trip.

Re:The network says no

[war4peace]

If you look at bandwidth with descending sort, you're right. But if you look at it from the other end, you're not.
I agree that when you want to access a server remotely and it's located on the other side of the world, with 16 Kb/s between you, it would suck. But consider I'm at home and I have a very powerful PC in my living room. I'm laying in my bad and feel like playing a nice game. I would love to fire up a remote connection from my crappy laptop/tablet, start the game remotely, play it as if I'm there. With 1ms latency and Gigabit bandwidth thanks to that awesome router, this is no longer a bandwidth/latency thing. It's 100% a remote desktop implementation thing. So shut up and take my money :)

Re:The network says no

[gstoddart]

I'll worry about that when my data-center is on Mars.

Then, I'm afraid you might not have enough practical experience on the topic.

I've encountered performance issues across an organization, and definitely been able to identify it as network latency.

And when we spoke with the network architects, they essentially told us it could be made no faster because of the distances involved. I'm not talking trans-continental/trans-oceanic links, I'm talking two data centers separated by only about a thousand miles.

And, with the latency issues, we can't make some things responsive enough to interactive users to not be exceedingly painful. A 60-100ms latency is enough to have users screaming at you as everything they do has a long delay in it -- for interactive applications, that's very noticeable.

You don't need to have data centers on Mars to be able to experience latency which is exceedingly painful. Within the last few months I've personally ran up against it in an organization which has offices through North America.

If you're just mirroring data, sure. But running an interactive application over a long-distance link for which latency becomes a factor -- that can be very painful. And even within North America, you can easily get to the point where the latency can't be fixed because the signal can still only travel so fast.

It really doesn't take all that much distance before it becomes observable. And angry/frustrated users don't want to be told about the laws of physics. They want to be able to click a button and not wait several seconds.

Re:The network says no

[lgw]

Don't both VMware and Citrix already offer commercial browser-based RDP solutions? Really, the only interesting part of this is that it's a FOSS solution. The engineering work needed to do RDP well is immense - change your streaming encoding on the fly as available bandwidth changes, detect that this rectangle is playing a movie, that rectangle is scrolling text, and the rest is static, and so on.

Doing RDP at all is easy; doing it well is impressive.

Re:The network says no

[Chirs]

I question the "horribly painful to use". Maybe it depends what you're doing. I use VNC across a distance of about 3000km (ping time of 53ms). I turned off lossy encoding to get crisper text for coding, and even with that while there's a noticeable lag it's good enough to use a shell, edit text, run virtual machine managers, etc.

I wouldn't want to watch video through it, or do media editing, but for typical office/coding work it seems to be basically okay.

Re:The network says no

[Dr_Barnowl]

You could probably replace most of them with a shell script.

Re:The network says no

[Riskable]

Reading your comment makes me think you'll love Gate One's ability to resume your session--even after restarting the process. I'll give you a hypothetical example:

1) I connect to https://gateone.mycompany.com/ and open up LibreOffice Calc.
2) I connect to the server running Gate One via SSH and run "/etc/init.d/gateone stop"
3) The web page reports it has been disconnected but it will retry connecting every five seconds.
4) I run "/etc/init.d/gateone start"
5) The web page reconnects to the Gate One server and my spreadsheet is back in front of me--right where i left it.

That works with terminals too if you install the dtach command. Everything will resume right where you left off even after killing and restarting the gateone.py process. This makes upgrading Gate One about as easy as can be; users will experience ~5 seconds of down time while the upgrade takes place and the process is restarted.

Re:The network says no

[X0563511]

h.264 1080p with a quality factor of 20 or 18? I'd be quite impressed if that were true.

Perhaps at a lower framerate, but I don't know if the encoder needs a certain amount of video to process (eg it may need a few frames ahead)

Re:The network says no

[Riskable]

I'm going to do everything in my power to make sure your use case works because I want to be able to do that too! I also want to be able to pick up where I left off if I have to work on something while I'm out & about. Just whip out my Chromebook and I'm coding using the desktop (or just the app) I left behind.

So yeah, I just gave away an interesting feature: If you're using a Linux desktop (like I do) and you fire up Gate One it can connect to the existing X11 display and forward just the app you want it to. It doesn't have to be the entire desktop.

Re: The network says no

[Anonymous Coward]

I get pings under 40 ms for pretty much anything in the continental US and around 200 ms is the upper limit of ping for elsewhere in the world. That's a 0.2 second delay from when you click to when the response gets back.

Anything higher than that and it's the fault of a shitty overloaded server, not the pipes.

Re: The network says no

[gstoddart]

Anything higher than that and it's the fault of a shitty overloaded server, not the pipes.

I honestly have no idea, since I'm not really a 'network guy'.

However, I am taking our network architects at face value when they tell me that the latency can't be addressed because of the distances involved. Since they are the network architects for a multi-billion dollar company, I am going to assume they know more about it than I do.

Re:The network says no

[h4rr4r]

With remote desktop like connections Mars would be out of the question, as that is minutes away. For something like gaming hundreds of miles is the effective limit before a human notices.

Re:The network says no

[Dahamma]

Three reasons this isn't all that "insightful" (sorry):

1) two hours to encode a two hour movie is real time.

2) 1080p h.264 video encoders are available in $10 chips. Or if you don't want dedicated hardware for it, it can also be done on a PC at good quality using a half-decent GPU.

3) there are already decent examples of this being done in the real world - OnLive, GaiKai, etc. So it's clearly not only plausible, but working.

Re: The network says no

[Anonymous Coward]

Several people have already answered but to hopefully distill it: latency != bandwidth.

That's really all there is to it. If you click pause on that hi-def video and it doesn't pause for several seconds that's latency. Video might be good but control virtually non-existent. That may be acceptable for movies but for interactive software it's balls. It's a much more advanced equipment

Re:The network says no

[Anonymous Coward]

My remote "desktop" is called screen, you insensitive clod! And it sure is almost realtime!

Re:The network says no

[forkazoo]

Well, it probably does real time encodes of 24 FPS content, but perhaps would struggle a bit more with 60 FPS+ Desktop content. Likewise, if the content is photographic, the compression artifacts tend to be less noticeable. Have some simple shapes and bright colors with crisp edges like a GUI in the mix, and you tend to need much higher quality than with photographic content. Even doing the encode in real time at adequate quality, you are probably encoding to a long GOP codec which has quite a lot of inherent latency. If the GOP size adds 1 second of latency, it doesn't matter how much CPU and bandwidth you throw at the problem, it would still be very bad for real time interactive uses.

* (Used to be an Engineer responsible for dealing with remote sites and technology for real time remote color grading sessions transmitted over the internet and over private WAN links using H.264 and JP2K based codecs mostly for TV commercials.)

Re:The network says no

[forkazoo]

Don't forget, you can buffer a YouTube video. Can't really get a 30 second buffer of an RDP session. The requirements are very different.

Re: The network says no

[rosseloh]

It's not necessarily distance that's the problem, but the number of hops in between. As a simplified example, if you were 1000 miles apart but had a direct fiber line with powerful equipment between locations, your latency would be less than if you were 10 miles apart but had 10 routers in the middle (I'm ignoring distance limits on the fiber and assuming it's one line). The routers have to process each packet, adding a bit to the round trip time for each hop. Not much time, to be sure (a few milliseconds), but it's there. And the more you're transmitting (1080p video, for example), the slower it will seem. The default ping packets in Windows aren't particularly big, and can be slightly misleading if you're looking for slowdowns regarding large transfers.

Your architects are right, though, in that "distance" is a good way to put it. It also depends on how your company is laid out - VPN links between offices? point-to-point T1? Etc...

Re:The network says no

[PPH]

ISPs purposefully sabotage remote desktop and VPN because it's a threat to their business model.

For you and I, the peon consumers, yes. But there are others out there looking for similar solutions. And they have their own Intranets, over dedicated fiber-optic lines.

Re: The network says no

[Merls the Sneaky]

I can get pings as low as 180 ms from Sydney to LA. maybe that's what they tell people to make them go away. Distance to LA to Washington DC 2,297 miles, LA to Sydney 7497.06 miles. Unless your connection is international the "distances involved" is a poor excuse indeed.

Re:The network says no

[Decker-Mage]

Yes they do have them and I'm looking at them and other solutions. They all have one problem, you need money. Usually lots of it to get it done well. My need is for household use, the target devices being everything in sight, especially (eventually) tablets to be hosted on my monster server/workstation. Households aren't something the big guys are even targeting, which makes about zero sense as being able to 'consume' on your portable devices anywhere, especially at home, really should be a valid target. [DLNA doesn't fill the bill since we'd have to junk what we already have that networks but doesn't do DLNA.] Now then I can consider the SO/HO and perhaps the S in SMB as a niche as, again, the big guys are fobbing off exactly the wrong solution in many situations around here (Central Valley, California) where money is the main limitation to setting up a solution that "just works." Whatever. At least I have something shiny to play with :-).

Re:The network says no

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like Guacamole. Been there, done that.

Re:The network says no

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, you are a moron. "Human-sense realtime?" Real time performance is a function of latency and sometimes jitter. Bandwidth and latency are orthogonal. If you had ever read anything about networking or computing science, you couldn't possibly be this ignorant.

My foes list is full or I'd simply ignore you. Can you stop posting, please?

Re:The network says no

[citizenr]

Look, the protocol could be the greatest thing since sliced bread. It could have free orgasms built into it. It might even have the cure for cancer.

But it can't overcome latency

umm have you tried ANY VNC software at all? I tried a TON and not a single one wanted to get even close to 10% of my 100Mbit LAN between two computers, while at the same time lagging badly. Network is not the problem, VNC programs not utilizing it are.
I would be perfectly happy with VNC server capable of pumping out >10Mbit video stream, doesnt mater if its jpeg, webp or h.264.

Re:The network says no

[grep -v '.*' *]

Well then, maybe you could get work to outfit them with a new uniform...

Re:The network says no

[Riskable]

Real-time encoding of desktop apps using h.264 is a bad idea. Text will look awful.

Gate One defaults to PNG encoding of screen/window/region captures and switches automatically to JPEG if updates start happening fast enough (because JPEG is much less CPU overhead than PNG). Its a threshold thing.

The quality can be adjusted on-the-fly as well. WebP support is there too but I'm torn as to whether to use it by default or not (if the browser supports it) because the CPU utilization is on par with PNG yet it is lossy (lossless works too but is too slow to encode to be realistic). The only benefit with WebP is reduced bandwidth... Admittedly it is a non-trivial amount (probably about half as much as JPEG at equivalent quality levels).

Once the beta is out I'll probably have more data to make a better decision about WebP.

Re:The network says no

[Riskable]

You'll love Gate One's X11 app then. With WebP encoding the bandwidth utilization playing back that Big Buck Bunny video hovers around ~700kbits/sec. With the default JPEG encoding it hovers around 1Mbits/sec (that's what you see in the Youtube video).

Even full-screen video playback never goes above 1.5Mbits/sec in my testing. That's with a 1366x768 display. Testing with JPEG encoding has it averaging out around 1.2Mbits/sec most of the time with peaks at 1.5MBits/sec here and there.

Re:The network says no

[Anonymous Coward]

RDP or, preferably encrypted VNC work way better on non-default ports than they do on 3389 or 5900-5901. This, so far, applies to the four ISPs I currently have access to: AT&T, Frontier, Time Warner, and Verizon.

Re: The network says no

[DeSigna]

That's across the lowest-latency, highest-performing set of international backbones out of Australia.

Now try a traceroute to waia.asn.au, hosted in Perth WAIX. I get 80-100ms from my core router in Brisbane, which has multiple carrier-grade fibre interconnects to upstream providers. A residential connection will add another 30-50ms. Perth is only ~4500kms away as the cable runs. You would be slightly better in Sydney (by ~10-15ms).

Some ISPs have poorly organised routing and peering arrangements that (for e.g.) terminate all VCs at a state-wide ag in the capital, so users next door to each other in Mackay have to route via Brisbane to ping each other. A Brisbane user trying to access something on a UQ website might end up going to Sydney and back instead of across an IX in Brisbane, which adds another ~30ms. Now imagine roaming users on 3G or LTE trying to use Citrix with latency bouncing up and down due to the medium itself.

A lot of what I do is either application delivery (Citrix, RDS, SSH, etc) or voice-grade comms. Our entire WAN business is built off the back of our experience in that area. 100ms is annoying. 200ms is unusable, from the perspective of Jane Sixpack sitting in front of her Citrix ERP app trying to key in phone orders or look up customer details. Jitter is incredibly frustrating and the source of many grey hairs.

International just gets silly. Average latency from AU to USA is 150-200ms, to the UK, 300-500ms, to Russia or Scandinavia, 500-600ms.

Re:The network says no

[dbIII]

See my post about not bouncing it off two satellites and routing via Helsinki.
There's not going to be many round trips so latency is a dead issue within the same time zone.

Re:The network says no

[dbIII]

I think I've stepped into a parallel world where all the slashdotters call the monitor on their desk "the computer" and the beige/black box "the hard drive". I expected one or two such utter losers, but not dozens screaming "latency" over a distance that can be traversed on foot in several seconds.
It seems the wayland argument has eaten everyone's braaaains.

Re:The network says no

[dbIII]

I'm talking two data centers separated by only about a thousand miles.

Which is, to put it frankly, totally fucking irrelevant to the very short distances in the situation being discussed.

Re: The network says no

[dbIII]

I'm sure some of my former students have become network architects for a multi-billion dollar company over the last decade and a half so name dropping will not get you as far as having an actual clue.

Re:The network says no

[dbIII]

Turn off your torrents.

Re: The network says no

[Anonymous Coward]

Incorrect, assuming your numbers to be correct, the latency between LA to Washington would be roughly 1/3 of your Sydney to LA time so roughly 60ms. That's sufficient to make interactive applications (paint programs, photoshop etc.) to demonstrate noticeable lag to a human.

Re:The network says no

[Anonymous Coward]

70ms is NY to London RTT with typical processing delays (3500mi). 300ms is California to NZ. If you're getting 100ms over only 1000mi then you've got significant bottlenecks somewhere. Possibly in your application.

Re:The network says no

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure why people still use VNC. NX is free and performs so much better.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NX_technology

Re:The network says no

[Skal Tura]

So - in other words, you are saying, excel requires less than 40ms latency? watching a remote movie requires less than 40ms latency? Wow, did netflix just take fiber to everyhome to achieve that?

40ms being the usual latency or there abouts for adsl 2 to a geographically nearby server.
if you allow 70ms you can go as far as from northern europe to central europe etc.

If the latency is below 41.67ms - it's imperceivable visually.

Does Counter Strike require less than 40ms latency? Yes and No. Many people played fine with cable with it's 60-70ms latency, and most people have 40ms latency nowadays. But i wish for the ADSL gen1 days with 15ms latency - it did make a difference.
But if you have sufficiently good remote desktop code: Your latency is just above the network latency, so if you have 40ms latency, you might have 45ms if it's sufficiently good, if you are playing on remote desktop local server, that has less than 0.5ms latency, depending upon the number of switches between. Most likely less than 0.15ms latency - makes no difference anymore.

So why wouldn't it work?

It's a mental handicap why you think it's can't work!

Thinclient gaming?

[earlzdotnet]

Would it be possible to play (non competitive/timing intensive) games over this!?

Re:Thinclient gaming?

[h4rr4r]

The speed of light is not your friend.

You can already do that if you are close enough to the end point. A few hundred miles is pretty much the limit before the delay between input and even occurring is too painful for gaming.

Re:Thinclient gaming?

[CodeReign]

splashtop already does this with nVidia graphics cards/tegra androids.

Re:Thinclient gaming?

[Anonymous Coward]

you mean like checkers... sure

Re:Thinclient gaming?

[Riskable]

Yes but it depends on the game. I wouldn't play an FPS but an RTS would be fine. I dare say that playing Solitaire would be so good you wouldn't even notice it was a remote desktop :)

Re:Thinclient gaming?

[smash]

Australian gamers disagree with your assessment. I've been gaming on US-based servers for over a decade now, and the minimum latency i see in that situation is north of 200ms. Regularly play FPS (co-op, like borderlands) with friends on the other side of the country...

Re:Thinclient gaming?

[h4rr4r]

Only ones that have no idea what they are talking about.

You are running that game locally, with a network connection to your friend. This means the game can cheat in many ways to cover up latency.

If you were instead running the game on a server some place and using something like remote desktop you would find 200ms pretty much intolerable.

Re: Thinclient gaming?

[Anonymous Coward]

The original question specifically stated that timing wasn't critical for the games he was talking about. For instance, just about any turn-based strategy game won't care if you have a huge latency because it's waiting until your next move before it actually proceeds with the turn.

Re: Thinclient gaming?

[h4rr4r]

The game caring about timing is not what I am saying.

The wait between button press and the action appearing on screen would be painful. Do you really want to select units then wait 200ms for that to happen?

Re: Thinclient gaming?

[Decker-Mage]

Actually I was quite used to that lag gaming from the central valley, CA, to Blizzard Los Angeles ( >200 ms lag) servers, way back when Diablo was new. It's all what you are used to with such things. Painful was also the description of what I was used to using the web with Mosaic back when the web was shiny &new as compared to, say, local BBS machines when viewed in retrospect. These days? I have to VPN a good way around the planet with Comcast basic internet in order to see that kind of lag.

Shell in a box....

[Anonymous Coward]

This is just like shell in a box.... just with some HTM5 snazz....

Not impressed.

Remotely Initiated Sessions?

[Anonymous Coward]

Will X11 support include the support for remotely initiated sessions/windows? All I want is to be able to control my HP 16500B oscilloscope from my computer....

Re:Remotely Initiated Sessions?

[Riskable]

Yes, that will work. By default I have the xorg.conf listening only on localhost but you could easily change it. X11 forwarding over SSH also works.

Ever seen...?

[Beardydog]

Yes. Splashtop Remote. I haven't used VNC in years, literally. Splashtop streams audio and video we'll enough to play games over, locally. Their account-based system nonsense is horrific, buy you can avoid it if you connect over a VPN.

Re:Ever seen...?

[earlzdotnet]

That's fine as long as you trust a proprietary protocol and use one of their supported operating systems (which doesn't include Linux or BSDs)

Re:Ever seen...?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. Splashtop Remote. I haven't used VNC in years, literally. Splashtop streams audio and video we'll enough to play games over, locally. Their account-based system nonsense is horrific, buy you can avoid it if you connect over a VPN.

I genuinely don't think I've ever seen anyone mistake the contraction for "we will" with "well". Neat!

Re:Ever seen...?

[MozeeToby]

Never used Swype or one of it's copycats?

Re:Ever seen...?

[Urza9814]

Yes. Splashtop Remote. I haven't used VNC in years, literally. Splashtop streams audio and video we'll enough to play games over, locally. Their account-based system nonsense is horrific, buy you can avoid it if you connect over a VPN.

I genuinely don't think I've ever seen anyone mistake the contraction for "we will" with "well". Neat!

You must never type with predictive algorithms. My smartphone swipe keyboard does that ALL THE TIME...not predictive enough I guess lol

Re:Ever seen...?

[seyyah]

Never used Swype or one of it's copycats?

Now you're just trolling, aren't you :)

Re:Ever seen...?

[hobarrera]

Closed source, doesn't run on linux... Sorry mate, wrong audience.

Re:Ever seen...?

[Beardydog]

They do have an Ubuntu package for the streamer, at least, or they used to. But not a client? I don't know. I've only ever needed to connect to Lonux, never from.

http://www.splashtop.com/linux

As for trust, yeah, no. My understanding is that the first version did, in fact, stream your screen completely unencrypted over the internet for remote sessions. And they charge a subscription for remote connections. Ridiculous. Which is why I use a VPN when I stream, and never log into their awful account system.

Re:Ever seen...?

[Beardydog]

It's only one of the many things iOS 7 has done to make me hate it.

Re:Ever seen...?

[Beardydog]

I wasn't trying to sell it to you, just answering the question in the headline. I have seen a streamer fast enough that I often use it to play unsupported video on an iPad (I'd rather do things like that locally than use one of the many "cloud browsers" that used to get articles here when iOS's lack of Flash was still worth talking about) , and have played a little Fallout 3 on it when the TV was in use. It's also worth noting that the streamer does run on Linux: http://www.splashtop.com/linux

Benefits aside, I've come to hate a Splashtop as a company, and they manage to make the software progressively worse with each update. If there were a FOSS alternative, I'd switch in a heartbeat.

Re:Ever seen...?

[TangoMargarine]

It would make sense in my geographic area. Nobody my age uses 'well'; it's all 'good' now, unfortunately. "We did good", "I'm good, how are you?" etc.

Re:Ever seen...?

[Decker-Mage]

Never used Swype or one of it's copycats?

Now you're just trolling, aren't you :)

Nope, MozeeToby wasn't. Some of the automatics are very interesting!

buffers

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not buffer the video?

Re:buffers

[Riskable]

Because it's not a video player. It's a remote desktop/X11 tool. The video is merely an acid test demonstrating how fast/efficient it is. If it is fast enough to play back a video surely it's fast enough to use a spreadsheet or a text editor, right?

What remote desktop won't play video?

[h4rr4r]

I have done it over forms of VNC, vmware view and Xendesktop.

Re:What remote desktop won't play video?

[Anonymous Coward]

Play video over VNC? I can barely use VNC to run regular apps over my own local WiFi network! I can't imagine how you'd run video over it. Maybe a small youtube video, but nothing big like HD.

dom

Re:What remote desktop won't play video?

[phoenix_rizzen]

rdesktop and NX both support video and audio as well. Over E10 lines, youtube video is watchable at 360p/480p (1024x768 virtual screen res). Going above that, though, is painful.

Re:What remote desktop won't play video?

[h4rr4r]

Try tigerVNC and get back to me.

You can run 3d HD games over it.

Everything in the browser?

[Anonymous Coward]

Once everything is in the browser I won't even need a computer any more.

I can get by with just a smartphone and one of those big fresnel lenses, imagine Stanley's workstation in the movie Brazil.

Re:Everything in the browser?

[Riskable]

Great: So now the computer manufacturers are going to point the finger to ME and say, "You're the reason why millenials aren't buying computers anymore!"

I really like the idea of using a fresnel lens over a smartphone to turn it into a larger desktop! I'm going to try that (I happen to have a big collection of fresnel lenses--don't ask =).

Re:Everything in the browser?

[TangoMargarine]

Hey, sounds like we would actually have a use for Retina displays in that case.

RDP did this in 2009

[smash]

... so yes, i've seen it before...

Re:RDP did this in 2009

[Urza9814]

Where did you find RDP in a browser, without plugins, in 2009?

Re:RDP did this in 2009

[dave420]

So that's the single benefit of this? Instead of launching a 1MB binary, it's just done in the browser? Wow. The future is here.

Re:RDP did this in 2009

[Urza9814]

Well, I agree with you somewhat. Native apps are always better. But I could see some special cases where this would win. If you need to use someone else's computer and you can't (or don't want to) install a bunch of crap they won't use. Or if you want a platform independent solution -- any OS, tablets, phones, whatever. And corporate admins seem to like keeping stuff network deployed -- pretty much the only software on my work laptop that runs locally is shit I downloaded myself. Everything else goes through Citrix or some VMWare network thing. This would be one less thing you need to install for anyone requiring remote access.

OnLive

[Dan East]

If they manage to pull that off they should name it something like "OnLive". Name just seems catchy and fitting to me.

Re:OnLive

[Anonymous Coward]

'Cept it'd be nice to play games that are on my $2500 gaming rig with my dinky laptop that's still capable of 1080p playback. Not on some other company's servers. :)

Re:OnLive

[war4peace]

Mod parent up, because I'm in exactly the same situation :)

Media Center Extenders

[FearTheDonut]

Windows Media Center had extenders (provided by HP and others, in addition to the XBox 360) that was nothing more than a remote desktop session into a Windows Media Center PC. They streamed video as far back as 2006 and hi-def after that. Of course, this is all within a home network.. But video is supported.

RDP - Win8 client to a Win2012 backend - very fast

[deviator]

Remote Desktop Connection (RDP) connected to a Windows 2012 server back-end is very capable of streaming video. It's kind of shocking how fast it is.

I've used some hosted remote desktop services over the past few years that are nearly indistinguishable from launching and using local applications - over a garden variety 10Mb/sec cable internet connection.

I used to also think that "they'll never overcome latency to the point where it's running at sufficient speed to feel like it's a local app" but at this point feel like that is a wrong assumption.

X11? What? We need Wayland!

[Anonymous Coward]

Video over X11? But... but.... I've been told you needed Wayland for that! Because X11 is slow and broken en horrible. And only Wayland will save us!

Note: this is (a poor attempt at) sarcasm. I'm a happy X11 user since, well, almost forever and have yet to experience the severe shortcomings people attribute to it.
 

Re:X11? What? We need Wayland!

[Riskable]

You know, if Wayland has Python bindings and an API akin to XCB (or Xlib) I can make it work with that too. Wouldn't even take much effort!

Re:X11? What? We need Wayland!

[PPH]

What Wayland will save us from is the traditional X11 break between graphical clients and desktops. Once we can get everything (almost) ported to native Wayland, we can stick you with a per display license for each client. Instead of load leveling a small set of X11 clients on the back room servers and handing them out to users where needed.

Wayland is the old Microsoft PC/Windows way of doing business. Each piece of glass gets its own seat license for each application.

Re:RDP - Win8 client to a Win2012 backend - very f

[Anonymous Coward]

Almost full frame rate at 1080p! But I hate how the image is overlayed, when the window moves, the image lags and breaks for a moment.

what is Gate One?

[Gravis Zero]

Gate One is an HTML5 web-based terminal emulator and SSH client.

Re:what is Gate One?

[Riskable]

That's what it is right now. Soon it will be so much more.

X11 is just the start. I also have File Transfer and other apps in the works. The File Transfer app will be interesting... It will be more than just an, "SFTP client." It will allow you to fetch a file from just about any URL (back-end is already written and supports ftp:// sftp://, ftps://, magnet://, and even dns://, dict:// and other obscure things which I think makes it all that more interesting/useful) and deliver it to any number of destinations you like. Even if the destination uses a different protocol.

So for example, if you wanted to download a magnet/bittorrent URL and have it automatically delivered to your home theater PC, your phone, and your brother's computer when complete you could do that.

Business side of it

[Anonymous Coward]

Information wants to free, so you should just release it for free and RMS will be happy for you which is worth more than any amount of money.

Completely MORONIC

[Anonymous Coward]

Video is incredibly compressed. Video decode hardware is essentially free in modern hardware. So, ANY modern 'remote' protocol should be passing across the COMPRESSED video stream, so the client can decompress and display it.

Articles like this show that too many fundamentally stupid people work in IT. The know NOTHING about the fundamentals, but know EVERYTHING about farcical abstracted environments so far removed from the hardware, the hardware literally needs to be thousands of times more powerful than it would otherwise need to be to process the same task using correct, efficient methods.

What excuse does anyone have for not exploiting a 2013 level of computer capability? What excuse does anyone have for NOT exploiting video decode hardware found in even the cheapest 5 dollar ARM SoC part to handle video display? Anyone proposing software-hacking video in new projects in 2013 is not competent to be working in software engineering full stop. They are the equivalent of visiting the doctor, and finding that he/she wants to give you leeches, or drain a pint or so of 'bad blood' from your body.

And yet, many of the self-declared 'nerds' that frequent sites like this have technical knowledge that was out-of-date more than ten years ago, and worse, many of these same 'nerds' are currently MOUTHY managers whose erroneous knowledge influences fundamental decision making in their companies.

I have NOTHING against those people proud enough to have such valve-making skills, that they can whip up a glass and metal rectifier in their own workshop from scratch. However, the suggestion that prehistoric outlooks on technology serve our current IT needs are a cancer.

PS I am fully aware that "wireless" display technology with a wireless back-path for client inputs is a 2013 technology coming with both new consoles from Sony and MS, and is a very valid solution to a specific problem. But this solution takes the HONEST approach of finding an efficient, low latency CODEC to encode the entire server display output, and stream the output as continuous video to the client device in industry standard H264 form. Such a solution is universally 'good', but not excellent when the resolution on the server side increases a lot, and fine localised detail becomes increasingly important. But, for remote purposes, you EITHER take a dumb approach, or an OBJECT approach. If you take an object approach in 2013, you MUST be passing on an object as complex as a video stream to the client device for decoding.

Re:Completely MORONIC

[BanHammor]

Would you consider the cost of encoding the video instead? That is not too free, so I hear.

Re:Completely MORONIC

[Riskable]

You're completely missing the point: Video playback over a remote desktop connection is merely an acid test. If it can play back a video that means the rate at which it can capture screenshots and send them to you is reasonably high. It's also an indication of how efficient it is.

Gate One's X11 feature isn't made for video it is merely efficient/fast enough to handle it. If I can open VLC and play back a video in my browser surely I can get reasonable responsiveness from something like a spreadsheet or IDE.

Re:Completely MORONIC

[Decker-Mage]

Actually, I happen to know the fundamentals quite well, seeing as I was around when we were inventing most all of them from scratch. [Why yes, I was there for the birth of the ARPAnet.] What is fundamental in browsing technology today is that the normal defaults that I encounter are to use hardware decode, and HTML 5 is specified in such a way to actually make it happen, in an objective (Object) sort of way. However, you have a flip-side here where you also must absolutely use a server-side codec that can support streaming hardware encode at a sufficient frame-rate and resolution. Exactly how many people really, really have that kind of hardware laying around? For more than one stream? No problem here. Which is why I specifically beefed up my server on the graphical end for when such a solution happened within financial striking range of real people, not gamers and technological crazies like me.

BTW, there is nothing so silly as assuming that only one particular approach will result in an optimal solution. Holding up object-oriented approaches as something holy is the sign of an evangelist (at best), not someone rational. IT is something I do as I'm quite good at it in addition to my normal day jobs (field systems engineer). It's one kind of approach. There are numerous others.

Re:RDP - Win8 client to a Win2012 backend - very f

[jonbryce]

So presumably it is streaming the actual video file to a local media player on the client machine?

Re:WTF?

[wiredlogic]

Vaporware doesn't generally have a repository on Github.

Re:RDP - Win8 client to a Win2012 backend - very f

[Riskable]

What is the CPU load while watching a video over RDP? I'm genuinely curious.

For reference, the gateone.py process(es) hover around 5% utilization when playing back a video @30fps (~720p resolution). Here's what it's doing while a video is playing back:

1) Capture the screenshot of the changed region on the X11 display. It can do this every 33ms (a capped equivalent to 30fps). It only needs to take screenshots when there's a change but in the case of a video it happens very fast, hence the 33ms cap.
2) Convert the raw captured image to selected format (JPEG for this example). It also makes a hash of the image that's used by both the server and client JS for caching purposes.
3) Transmit the image to the browser. If the image has recently been sent to the client it will be aware of this and will only send the hash. This transmission occurs in binary mode over the WebSocket (it's complicated).

From that point it's up to the client-side JavaScript to handle displaying the raw JPEG data. It is quite CPU-intensive if your hardware doesn't accelerate 2d canvas elements but not too bad (Chrome will hog around 50-80% of a single core while the video plays). Everything will remain responsive regardless.

For reference, I've done extensive benchmarking of the browser-side CPU utilization and Chrome's developer tools will report 81% idle even when the actual CPU consumption of the process is nearing 80%. That means that all the overhead is inside the code that renders canvas elements; which is good because it means my JavaScript is not a bottleneck.

Yes?

[SirMasterboy]

"Ever seen a remote desktop tool that's fast/efficient enough to play back video?"

Yes...

Microsoft's own Remote Desktop (with RemoteFx) and also third party program called Splashtop can both play back video smoothly remotely for me.

In the browser?

[Anonymous Coward]

Browsers often have imperial fucktonnes of exploits. Is it really wise to run a remote desktop tool in that sort of environment?

Re:In the browser?

[Riskable]

I don't know about that. When I think to myself, "What has an imperial fucktonne of exploits?" here's what comes to mind:

* Windows (and Microsoft software in general)
* Java (and especially the use of Java inside browsers)
* Flash
* PDFs
* Loads of other proprietary software/solutions

Exploiting the browser these days is very difficult and browser vendors are doing a really good job with competitions/incentives to uncover vulnerabilities before they become a problem. Using the browser has the distinct advantage of *not* having the same problems of the proprietary products I enumerated above. You get whole new ones! But at least they're manageable and (mostly) predictable.

The more apps that are available in browsers the better. They're as cross-platform as you can get right now and if you host them yourself you can avoid the spying problem.

Re:In the browser?

[smash]

If you look at all those windows exploits, the lions share of them are in the browser. Exploiting the browser these days isn't really difficult, they generally fall within the first day at pwn2own.

Re:In the browser?

[Riskable]

Whoah there! Don't confuse "in the browser" with "in Internet Explorer."

2012 was the first year that Chrome was successfully exploited and Firefox has done fairly well every year. At the 2013 event the Chrome exploit only worked in Windows!

Chromecasting VLC

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd love to use this setup to rig my Chromecast to play my in-browser RDC VLC video on my TV!

Re:Chromecasting VLC

[Riskable]

That won't work so well since this doesn't currently support audio. It's in the TODO list though :)

Also, if you're playing back a video you're much better off just playing it directly in the browser. You can even re-encode videos in real-time to be played back with whatever codecs Chromecast supports (if necessary).

Rhetorical Question?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever seen a remote desktop tool that's fast/efficient enough to play back video?

Yes? And? Watching video isn't the end-all use case.

RDP

[Barryke]

Ever seen a remote desktop tool that's fast/efficient enough to play back video?

Err, yes. RDP.
Its so effecient i often wonder why my wooden medieval laptop running Linux is able to play the video, thats when i realize its streamed via RDP from my Windows PC. Sound and everything.

VLC ?

[Lennie]

The demo uses mplayer.

But whatever, details, who cares, right ? :-)

Re:VLC ?

[Riskable]

Actually the demo uses smplayer.

But whatever, details. Who cares, right? ;D

smart desktop says yes

[dutchwhizzman]

If you recognize that you are in fact streaming video, you can buffer that video ahead and keep the rest of the display nice and interactive. There's no reason you can't divide the display you are remote serving into several sections and give them each their own update/caching/buffering strategies.

Re:smart desktop says yes

[Riskable]

That's exactly how Gate One's X11 app works. Well, it can't buffer video in any significant way without adding non-trivial delays to interactivity but it does keep independent caches for each window on the screen and each gets their own encoding/quality strategy based on how often updates occur (bandwidth utilization isn't taken into account yet).

So that terminal running in the background will have nice and crisp, PNG-rendered text while the video playing in the forground will utilize JPEG (or WebP) encoding to reduce bandwidth (and CPU consumption on the server). If you look closely you can see this in the video.

NoMachine

[neurovish]

"Ever seen a remote desktop tool that's fast/efficient enough to play back video?"

Yeah, NX. Been using it for awhile.

Re:NoMachine

[Burz]

"Ever seen a remote desktop tool that's fast/efficient enough to play back video?"

Yeah, NX. Been using it for awhile.

I'll second this. And the protocol IIRC is open source (FOSS implementation is freeNX). I think X should have integrated this years ago (replacing its clunky version of network abstraction) as it makes using a remote machine seem almost like its local.

Another thing X --or whatever replaces it-- needs is the ability to share app windows or desktops between more than one person, something the commercial version of NX implemented a while back (OS X and Windows laid the groundwork for efficient remote sharing back in the early 2000s). Note that VNC, a primitive bitmap-tosser, doesn't compare to these protocols in terms of performance.

Re:NoMachine

[Anonymous Coward]

Nomachine was incredible. But I had to stop using it because every month or two my desktop would crash and 8 desktop full of partially done work would go away. I am back to plain VNC now, and I regularly leave the machine up for 3 months at a time with no reboots/hiccups.

Re:NoMachine

[Riskable]

Gate One's X11 app already supports sharing of individual windows or whole desktops. I haven't implemented a GUI for it yet but that's just one of many TODO items I'm working through before the beta.

Re:RDP - Win8 client to a Win2012 backend - very f

[slimjim8094]

Yes, this is called multimedia redirection and it seems to work with any DirectShow-using application (so you'd expect VLC to blow up).

AIUI the idea is that you just stream the compressed video, plus some metadata for "it goes here, it's this big, and it's at this point". It seems to work pretty well, because obviously the compressed video is much smaller than 30 images a second that need to be individually compressed.

I despair - xpra?

[tota]

As an open-source project, what do we need to do to get the same amount of publicity as those for-profit companies? Do I need to pay slashdot or something?
All this talk about remote desktop, and xpra is not mentioned once, despite having better performance than all the solutions mentioned thanks to hardware acceleration. It is also seamless, which a browser window is not. etc.. sigh.

Re:I despair - xpra?

[Riskable]

How many submissions have you made? I didn't pay anything to get this posted. I just typed it up into the submission form earlier today and about an hour and a half later it appeared on the front page. I've done that 5 times now (not just for Gate One) with 6 attempts (I ended up having to re-submit something once =). So an accept/submit ratio of 5/6--not bad.

I personally think xpra is awesome. When searching for examples of XCB use in Python it came up in a number of results. My only issue with it is that it requires a client be installed.

Clients have to be deployed to every desktop and you have to re-deploy every time there's an update. I've been in IT long enough that I am absolutely sick of that. Web apps are the way to go. Deploy once to the web server(s) and you're done. No need to push out updates to clients.

Re:RDP - Win8 client to a Win2012 backend - very f

[smash]

Pretty much the same as playing one locally - because the raw h.264 (or whatever) data stream gets sent over RDP and it uses your local hardware to play the video the same way it does locally.

The network says yes most of the time

[dbIII]

The answer is don't bounce it off two satellites and route it via Helsinki.

Remote X, rdp or even elderly versions of VNC don't have problems with latency within the same city if that's the constraint. Lack of bandwidth forcing latency problems is a different story and is not really a latency problem - the solution there is to cut down on traffic until it fits.
Since people are playing MMORGS on the other side of the Pacific to the servers they are using I really think you are overstating the latency thing far beyond the reach of credibility. So then, what's the real issue? What exactly is it you don't like that you are hiding behind such an empty claim?

X2Go

[Pav]

Spice has already been mentioned, but X2Go is pretty awesome... it's a cousin of NoMachines NX except it's open source, and very easy to set up (at least in the Debian-packed versions I've used). It can also proxy RDP (which might be of benefit to someone).

Re:X2Go

[wonkey_monkey]

New to X2Go? Start here!!!

  soon to come

Ahhh, open source software.

Re:RDP - Win8 client to a Win2012 backend - very f

[devent]

How is 80% CPU usage "not bad"?
It's like JavaScript fan-boys are happy that a 1995 Doom game is rendered with 30 FPS in the browser.

Yes I have seen...

[Anonymous Coward]

Both Remote Desktop and Vnc can play videos fine, rdp even with sound. It all depends on your network. So yes already we have a non starter. Not to mention the fact that for streaming video we would use a streaming video protocol not a Remote Desktop protocol.

Re:RDP - Win8 client to a Win2012 backend - very f

[Riskable]

Oh that's unaccelerated, man! For whatever reason my laptop's Intel video doesn't get 2d accelerated canvas (probably a driver bug). On my wife'x iMac the CPU utilization hovers around 10% playing the same video.

Just wait until I get it working with a 3d WebGL context. Then it will be using hardly any CPU at all!