The thinking mans lazy PC question

Mercutio

Mercutio

Mercutio

Soldato
Joined
11 Jun 2003
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Sheffield, UK
Been looking around and there's a fair amount of KVM over cat5 extenders
There's also IP switches where you can control several over a front end (it basically end up looking like terminal services but it's a hardware solution so works even if the machines screwed and can't boot etc, called a console in the IT industry)

Was wondering if theres a combination of the 2?

Would like to take monitor/keyboard/mouse into a box, over a network and into my PC in another room. Basically for a little light gaming in the comfort of my living room. With the mass of options for the 2 above finding something that specifically does this is proving tricky. The first option isn't quite viable as it requires a dedicated patch cable between source and remote control. I basically need the first over IP though. Anyone know anything of it?

In before any "omg thats sooo not possible" we can play WoW on a cellphone via GPRS (thin client, sending inputs to a proper logged in PC and showing you the display), yes not in an IMBA way but it works, i'm after something that's not a lightyears step up from this.
 
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Hmmm I don't get what they are offering from the initial product info, will take a look at a review tho.

Basically tho, just think like a second monitor, mouse and keyboard plugged into my main machine with all the stuff i'd get sat infront of it but from a networked console. If I miss-read the initial thing with these and that's what they do, cool :)
 
Ok, thats a kvm extender, think about it, they need dedicated wire. I want that but the over IP version (I'm thinking the signal they throw down the cable isn't one that network switches/hubs can pass correctly unless they have the right sort of data packet).
 
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I'm a bit confused by why you don't want to take the thin client approach. If you like you can bolt a mini-itx computer to the back of a monitor, keyboard/mouse connect to the mini-itx and you run the network cable from it to whatever combination of routers/switches you like. If its for gaming, I strongly recommend gigabit.

The net effect is you type, commands sent over ethernet to the computer, which acts on your command and sends the results back down ethernet which end up on the screen attached to the mini-itx box.

VNC et al will do this. If the remote computer is a good one, use some form of compression. Nomachine / freenx is my favourite for this, it compresses things on the fly by various amounts. You choose which machine to log into by ip, name etc. It's not going to be as good as local in terms of latencies but nothing over ethernet will be.

So yeah, I'm not sure why you don't like this approach.
 
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This may well be what i'm after but i've never seen any remote control/terminal services software that can handle directx/etc overlay.

Meh, i'll let this die and carry on looking at suggestions given, ty guys.
 
I don't know what directx overlay is, but if it helps I played morrowind on a 630mhz celeron eeepc over a 100mb and it was perfectly usable and far better than running it locally. I don't have a gigabit network to confirm, but the difference between doing this over wireless g and 100mb was like night and day.

Morrowind isn't particularly demanding, but it still throws frames to the screen pretty quickly.

Good luck with your search
 
That passes then, directx overlay as in games, if you had a dodgy old box with VNC playing morrowind then it will do the job nicely, thanks :) Usually with remote desktop type apps the screen just goes blank as soon as a game goes up.
 
I didn't know that normally happened, it seems possible. Nomachine and freenx are the ones I've been using, there are probably other options.

I can't work out how I did this now though. NX server for windows doesn't appear to exist, though nx client for windows/linux/osx are free and readily downloadable. FreeNX is an open source build that lets you use a linux distribution as the server. My best guess is that I ran morrowind under linux then shared that over the network, which hamstrings this idea somewhat.

VNC server/client works well, but you'll lose the intelligent compression. VNC sent over compressed ssh is the best software solution I can think of. Not sure what else would be viable
 
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