Remote desktop software on a netbook for performance

[Radiation]

If i used my nc10 to control a c2d pc running lubuntu would i get better performance with certain applications and flash heavy sites?

This will be over lan, i just prefer to use the netbook instead of the pc sometimes but performance is lacking under certain conditions, multitasking is difficult as the nc10 just can't handle it, i have no idea how well this would work though?

 

[bledd]

Wouldn't work

Remote desktop software never plays well with moving images

 

[Radiation]

It's not like i want to game or anything but i would like to use it to watch hd flash video, it thought it would have come a long way since i last tried in over five years ago, now theres a lot more performance and improved codecs surely?

 

[bledd]

No chance.

Not trying to be blunt here, but it's not a viable option..

 

[Radiation]

How is it a streamed video can work but not this, obviously it will be downscaled to the netbook resolution by the server before being sent.

 

[Rroff]

Streamed video is pre-compressed and decoded on the fly by the CPU - if you've ever compressed a video you'll notice you need a pretty powerful CPU to get anything like realtime compression on a decent resolution - added onto this video compression works by analysing the frames around each frame (both forward and backward) to get decent compression levels, with realtime encoding unable to look ahead of whats currently onscreen its a lot harder to get effective compression of moving images - resulting in remote desktop sending uncompressed or only slightly compressed (i.e. RLE) tiles.

A 1280x720 video streamed via remote desktop in realtime @ 30fps would require more than 600Mbit/s bandwidth on your LAN and even with simple compression more than 200Mbit/s - you could slap jpeg compression on there and take the quality hit but even then the CPU requirements and bandwidth are fairly significant unless you take a massive quality hit.

EDIT: I believe the remote desktop server also has to use motion detection so that it can reduce bandwidth by only sending tiles around the area where data has changed, which again chugs a lot of CPU if you have a lot of motion i.e. a decent resolution movie.

 

[Radiation]

Thanks for the explanation, i guess technology hasn't moved on as much as i thought, disappointing.

 

[Rroff]

You could have a look at streammygame.com - not checked in awhile so dunno if it handles movies at all but could be useful to you.

 

[Radiation]

That appears to only be for certain games, though i could be wrong, isn't there a free piece of remote desktop software that comes close to what im after?

It doesn't have to be perfect, i just want reasonable quality and reasonably smooth playback of video, most won't even be hd, im talking about youtube type stuff, general flash websites and multitasking, the desktop pc only needs to output 1024 by 800 to the netbook over lan, it must be possible to get something reasonable?

 

[wesley]

nope

 

[Inferno99]

Just tested 2 W7 computers Windows Remote Desktop - Youtube 720p streams absolutely fine over Gigabit LAN. Unfortunately your NC10 only has 10/100 or wireless which would not be sufficient.

 

[KIA]

Just tested 2 W7 computers Windows Remote Desktop - Youtube 720p streams absolutely fine over Gigabit LAN. Unfortunately your NC10 only has 10/100 or wireless which would not be sufficient.

Did you monitor bandwidth consumption?

 

[Inferno99]

Did you monitor bandwidth consumption?

Well 720p Youtube plays good, however 720p mkvs show some slight tearing with VLC. Bandwidth is only ~7MB/s so might get away with fast ethernet. Overall the system is very usable, but then again the specs are very different than the OP.

There's no loss in having a go - let us know how you get on.