Is Remote Desktop fast enough?
Why remote desktop (RDP) isn't fast enough for watching videos on a remote PC? On my iPad, I tried to remote control a computer on my local network and open a video on it, but it wasn't fast enough (the video refresh rate was terrible). I've purposely tried to connect to the local area IP 192.168.0.xxx, my router touts 54Mb/s of transfer rate. What do I need to do to make my view of the video on the remote PC more fluid? Added (after reading keen's answer): For example, if I want to stream from twitch.tv, that's hard because twitch.tv's ipad app doesn't work the majority of the time, so I can't really go directly to the "source". Other times when i'm browsing a site on the computer, and it streams a video. I want to sit on a sofa and watch it. It's inconvenient for me to type in the address on my ipad's browser again to go directly to the source. And this is a small website that hasn't created an app yet. 54Mbps (which is 6.75MBps) isn't great speed in front of local disk speed. Despite the number is bigger than Blu-ray's 30-40Mbps bitrate, don't forget its theoretical number and RDP transfers RAW frames which isn't compressed as in video formats. So, video of your question shouldn't be high quality. Now, do these things before creating RDC: Click on arrow next to "Options" to reveal "Advanced Options". Go to "Display" tab and change all display settings to maximum (like Colors to 32-bit). Go to "Experience" tab and change "Connection Speed" to LAN. Also, set maximum settings of all experience options. Update after Question Update: However, you aren't out of luck. You can use a nice RDP compression and acceleration software. Remote Desktop works by transferring graphical information from the remote computer to your local computer. In the most naive straightforward implementation of this functionality, everything would be rendered on the remote computer. And then the snapshots of already rendered data would be sent over to RD client computer. However, RD implementation is much less naive. For graphics that consists of "line art" and text drawn through Windows API, Remote Desktop actually performs a remote procedure call: it sends the API call parameters to the client machine and carries out the actual call on the client machine. I.e. the graphics is actually rendered on your local client machine. This is an extremely compact and efficient way to transfer graphics, which is why all "line art" and text drawn through Windows API work very fast over Remote Desktop connection. Basic Windows GUI is one example of such graphical information. In essence, this graphical information is transferred over the network in extremely efficient vector form. This is what makes typical Windows GUI elements to work so well over Remote Desktop connection. Now, any graphical information that cannot be described as a sequence of vector Windows API calls has to be transferred in bitmap form. That applies to raster images, for example. You probably noticed that ordinary bitmap images are drawn in Remote Desktop client much slower than typical GUI elements. The same applies to video. Video is actually played on remote machine and then the rendered result is transferred to your local client machine as a rapid sequence of bitmaps. This generates a huge amount of network traffic, which easily exceeds the bandwidth of a typical connection. This is why videos are virtually unplayable through Remote Desktop. You're asking the wrong question. You're looking to find a way to play video on your iPad from your computer via RDP. You should be asking how to play the video natively on your ipad. RDP is the wrong tool for the job. Unfortunately, since you don't mention what kind of video you're dealing with, I can't fully answer that underlying question of how to play it. I can suggest a few ways to play video on iPads though:
I hope this helps. I recommend posting more details on the video you're trying to watch, as that'll help us give you more useful advice on how to get it to your iPad. Now that you've mentioned Twitch.tv specifically, and the issues you're having, I can provide more accurate advice. Something to try is to just open http://twitch.tv/ in Safari. Their site has extremely limited support for this though. Only some streams are accessible this way, it looks like only Featured streams can be viewed. In addition, you can't view archived streams. I also did some digging to see if there was a way to use your computer to mirror or transcode the Twitch.tv streams, but the usual tool I look to for this, PlayOn, doesn't have support built-in and I couldn't find a plug-in that adds it. There's a manual way to get the archived streams to your iPad. You can download the .flv of an archived stream (per this thread):
In between 5 & 6, you can optionally use a tool to merge the multiple .flv files into one .flv file that has the whole video. Try using AirPlayit. I use it to stream video to my iPhone and iPad. It also, supports Android (buggy for my device tho). It is really easy to use and set up. I can stream all my audio and video fluidly through it. I know it supports FLV, but Im not sure if you have to have the FLV downloaded or not. Check it out, it might be exactly what your are looking for. Plus its free! |