Comment by eins1234 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eins1234 | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one that has long since given up traditional desktop streaming software like TeamViewer/AnyDesk and the like for game streaming software (Parsec, Rainway, Steam Remote Play, etc) that just happen to offer desktop streaming because they can? The actual streaming tech in those feels worlds ahead in terms of quality/efficiency/stability/latency. And the UX has generally felt better as well with much more streamlined onboarding and everyday operation.

I personally have been using Parsec most often these days and might even start paying money for it soon for some of their advanced features, as they've recently pivoted their marketing towards the productivity side, which is a move I'm happy to support with my wallet. I honestly don't see a reason why someone would use any of the traditional players in the space these days for personal use. Not sure how the tech in this project compares, but I think it should try to measure itself against something like Parsec/Rainway rather than TeamViewer/AnyDesk if it wants to compete at the state of the art.

I think the difference is that Teamviewer/AnyDesk is intended mostly for corporate usage. Their software is optimised for images that are mostly static, letting them get away with much less bandwidth without making text blurry or illegible. Standard H.264/H.265 encoded video needs sharpening and extra filters to be both low bandwidth and legible in many cases.

Parsec and friends use more bandwidth and hardware resources to get a stream going, but that stream is of much higher quality. You probably won't be running a fully-staffed remote support company over DSL or basic cable with Parsec, but with Teamviewer you just might. I've made several remote support connections at the same time on ≤8Mbps down on a simple Core i3, you just can't get that done with a game streaming solution like Parsec. Modern streaming services also require hardware encoding support or their CPU requirements are huge, and the endpoints support software often connect to isn't that powerful.

Microsoft's RDP solution in excellent on all fronts, though. Normal H.264 encoding for moving content and static-optimized codecs for office machines, all with heuristics to switch codecs on the fly. Sadly, this is all locked away behind licenses for consumer devices, but the technology is there.

Yes, RDP is mind blowingly good compared to VNC and most other tools for "office" applications. I'm fairly sure for non video/game content it just sends the "vectors" of the UI over which get rendered on your local machine instead of compressed bitmaps (I could be wrong on this though).

You're basically correct. RDP can model and transfer data semantically - i.e. it's not just pixels, but higher order objects like toolbars, buttons, and the like. VNC and most others just do raw image/video transfer, with whatever codecs and compression they choose. Of course, RDP can only use semantic data for apps that support it, and it makes sense these would be official MS apps first.

>Microsoft's RDP solution in excellent on all fronts, though.

Is it? Even on gigabit LAN there's a noticeable amount of latency. For web surfing it's mostly passable, but for text/code editing it's very annoying.

That has not been my experience, I regularly RDP to a workstation and code from there.

We even ran our Dev machines in Azure over RDP/WAN. Only those on <30Mbps connections had noticable issues

i use rdp over zerotier and it works like magic. the "server" is having a 30mbps connection so i'm limited by that. still, the experience of over 15 concurrent users is not bad.

i do excel, word, Libreoffice, firefox, heck employees even watch youtube on firefox over rdp and its "slightly" difficult to have it desync video and audio sometimes but it works.

my only problem is getting rdpwrap to patch every 3-4 months. i run ltsc so i should be getting less updates but what do you know, it messes up and all hell breaks loose.

Just to add to the anecdotes.. I regularly run RDP over VPNs and web gateways all over WiFi and only occasionally feel a little bit of lag, otherwise it's so fast I forget it's not my local device. I largely use CLI's, IDE's, Office, web browsing, and often tell myself off for watching YouTube videos over the RDP connection instead of locally.

Huh? Something must be seriously wrong with your network. I did everything via RDP (including watching movies) for years, over ADSL, with no issues whatsoever.

why isn't there a free implementation similar to what microsoft does with rdp? i mean vnc is not it.

terminal services.

people are stuck with either paying microsoft/citrix or using rdpwrap

Parsec doesn't support remoting into a Linux machine, so that was the dealbreaker for me.

I’m waiting for someone to make this for the Linux desktop. I would think Steam may push into it with their SteamOS project.

You can already stream games from a Linux machine with Steam and then get to the desktop. It's baked in, but I'm not sure you can directly stream the desktop without launching a game before, but it works pretty well. I managed to play a game running on my Linux desktop in the UK while being in mainland Europe ! Wasn't a bad experience at all.

You can set the Steam Link app to show the desktop when you connect.

You can use https://github.com/loki-47-6F-64/sunshine which uses the same protocol as Nvidia GameStream, and you can access it with https://moonlight-stream.org/

With the protocols you mention, are you able to reach an unattended machine and take control of it or does someone have to be at that machine to grant you remote access?

Parsec, to be fair, directly targets remote desktop usage as it's core feature set nowadays (business-wise).

But yeah, definitely. Parsec is far, far superior to TeamViewer et al.

If I've got 350 desktops to manage, is there a console/dashboard for doing that with Parsec? The pricing page looks like they want you to manage a small team or go 'Enterprise', which is 'Call for pricing', which automatically makes me think I'll be wasting time.

No. It's meant for giving user's access to their personal (physical, not VDI) desktop or for giving access to a pool of physical desktops to people to share.

It competes with RDP more than TeamViewer.

Yes, you're the only one out of the 8 billion people on Earth.

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