Remote desktop connection?

[RangerWickett]

Howdy. I heard that it's possible for you to let someone log onto your desktop, so they can see what you see. Is that true? How does it work? What kind of bandwith does it eat up?

My goal here is to let my girlfriend, who is in Brazil, watch the same movie that I'm watching, as sort of a dinner-and-movie style date. We're also going to order pizza, preferably with the same toppings. But don't tell her. It's supposed to be a surprise. I'm pretty sure she doesn't read the tech boards.

Any help or suggestions?

 

[Redrobes]

Wow Ranger - never heard of a date like that before... hope it goes well !

There are many ways of seeing another persons desktop. The old timer is VNC which is pretty ubiquitous over all the OS'es and was used so much that MS either used bits of it or created their own kind. I cant remember exactly how what happened behind the scenes. Anyway there is one fairly big difference.

VNC basically captures bits of the screen that change and send over the visual bits of that screen as a bitmap. Remote desktop keeps looking at all the windows messages and sends over what is required to redraw the desktop on the remote machine and where it cannot then it sends bitmaps. So remote desktop is usually a bit faster.

On the whole, both work pretty well. You will get a small amount of lag with both and screen updates occur at intervals a little less than real time. I guess it would depend on your bandwidths and link latency but I would think it unlikely that you could send video in real time over a link like that. At the end of the day the data rate coming off of the DVD file / disc would have to be matched in bandwidth with your internet link to see it at full res and real time.

I would try both of these methods just to see how it goes. You will have to program your router to port forward on the server side and check your firewall settings as you will be locally hosting a connection.

 

[XCorvis]

I agree with Redrobes, but I'm a lot less optimistic about it. Going to Brazil you're going to get some serious lag. The movie is going to look like stop-motion video. It's going to work a lot better to send her a copy and start it at the same time while chatting on skype or something.

Also I'm not sure if VNC/remote desktop does sound...

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

I've tried watching video via a Remote Desktop connection over a T1 to a 3Mbps DSL connection. It was unwatchable. The video requires a lot of bandwidth. Sorry, but this isn't very likely to work out.

 

[Marius Delphus]

Gonna have to second the "start it at the same time while chatting/phoning" idea. My "fast" VPN connection, which allows me to remote-control my work machines from home, isn't even capable of displaying the OS "as though I'm sitting there." I can perform a test with video tonight, but I don't have high hopes. And this is computers sitting less than 20 miles apart (though with who knows what route between them).

In addition, this setup obviates the whole router/firewall/why-the-heck-can't-she-connect thing. It's an extremely neat idea, but I agree that it's likely to be impractical.

 

[RangerWickett]

Thanks for the info.

Time to do something slightly illegal.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

Breaking the Law!
Breaking the Law!!