[bacchus]

Hey folks wondering if anyone might be able to shed some light on things for me.

I currently have two machine son my home network, my 12" Powerbook with Airport Extreme and a brand new PC running XP.

The laptop is connected through airport to a linksys 80211G base station, the PC is plugged directly into the base station through ethernet.

Now i've been running Remote Desktop to run apps on the PC for testing web work, and even with the settings turned down it can be a bit slow and choppy, by no means unusable, but slowe than expected.

So couple of questions.

Shouldn't I with a 80211G speeds be able to stream video across the connection between machines and have it play normally?

And are there settings on either mac or pc that i could fiddle with to improve speeds.?

Thanx y'all

[Macola]

I think you may be expecting too much of RDC. It's great for average use (I have a setup very similar to yours) but for anything graphic-intensive, and I would include any type of video in that category, it just doesn't cut it.

[larkost]

I am going to second Macola on this one. If you are doing streaming video tests on the PC, there is no remote desktop viewer that is ever going to function well, no matter what your connection.

[ginoledesma]

RDC will definitely not be able to "stream" live video, even if you're on a switched 100Mbps network. It isn't so much as the network that's holding it back, but the protocol itself. Other factors involved in RDC is the CPU for both hosts, including the protocol itself. The protocol by default attempts to compress the information that will be sent across the wire (or in your case, over the air). This takes time, and for fast refreshes to video, the protocol will simply drop these.

The closest I've seen to almost-live remote video display is Famatech's Remote Admin. This is Windows-only software that allows you to do remote administration and file transfer, just like Timbuktu Pro. You can adjust the number of frames sent over the network. I've noticed that at the full 100 screen updates, CPU usage constantly hovers at 60%-80%.

I use VNC myself, as its pretty much an "open standard." You can use the server software on major platforms (Linux, Unix, Mac, Windows), and there are numerous clients everywhere. TightVNC uses their own Tight codec that's really bandwidth-friendly (very much usable on a dial-up connection). Hextile/RAW encoding gives you acceptable "live" updates at the cost of bandwidth.

Of course, if you really want "live" feeds, then sending the display screen over the network in its RAW form will probably kill even a 100Mbps network.

If your goal is to get video (i.e. movie) streaming, you can always opt to get a dedicated streaming server software, like VideoLAN's VLS or VLC.