How to speed up screen sharing?

If you have not already done so set System Preferences > Quicktime > Streaming to 1.5Mbps and restart iChat.

Also in iChat menu > Preferences > Video section make sure the Bandwidth is on NONE.
If this does not work and your ISP practices a Fair Usage policy try it in stages down to 500kbps (Do this anyway for Comcast or Road Runner)



10:25 PM Tuesday; March 31, 2009

Is this tip about quicktime streaming for Screen Sharing in general or only if you use iChat as your VNC Viewer?

I am expriencing the same thing with RealVNC Viewer and Ultra VNC

Hi,

In System Preferences > Quicktime > Streaming are several Speed Settings.
They apply to all Video Streaming apps.

It has been know since iChat 2 that iChat reads this setting and interprets it into a number.
This is fine for most settings but the Automatic one in Tiger along with the Intranet/LAN one as the fasted but bottom of the drop down had problems. The Automatics got read as a zero.

It is for this reason that we suggest that the streaming be set at 1.5Mbps.

iChat in Screen Sharing uses an Audio feed at the same time.
The same codecs are used for Audio only Chats and Video Chats.

In a Video chat in iChat you can view what iChat is supposedly using during in type of Chat in the Connection Doctor (Video menu) during a Live chat.

Depending on the Internet Speeds (Both Upload and Download) at both ends you may see about 25-30kbps for n Audio Only chat and up to 500kbps fro a Video chat.

Screen Sharing in iChat come sin at about 40-45kbps and therefore is much less reliant on the overall speed of the Internet connection.

A pure Screen Share using the App that is used in the Finder > Go Menu > Go to Server and starting the line VNC uses less as it is the Screen Share only with no Audio.

I see RealVNC does a Mac version. The UltraVNC seems Windows only.

From the UltraVNC site ( http://www.uvnc.com/general/faq.html)

About Speed, have you some benchmarks available?
No. Sorry. Maybe later. For now, we suggest that you test it over a LAN or Modem connection. You should find it quite fast...

It seems it should work.

RealVNC FAQs http://www.realvnc.com/support/faq.html

iChat Screen Sharing uses a Random port that is not listed (even as A range) in either of the two Apple Articles on the subject and it is this that is the sticking point for most people.

As UPnP in a routing device allows the app to control which ports are Open this method of opening/allowing ports tends to be best for iChat.

In Summary.
The Quicktime Streaming thing is aimed at Video chats in iChat mostly.
The two sites I have linked you to should have the answers.
As the Screen Sharing in iChat is normally a Port based issue I would look to checking the relevant ports are open for the apps involved.



7:54 PM Monday; April 6, 2009

Apple's VNC has pros and cons. The trouble with Apple's VNC implementation is that it does not have a "low bandwidth" setting. In my tests, it always uses relatively high bandwidth, compared to OSXVnc and Chicken of the VNC, using COTVNC's 8 bit color depth setting. There is just no way to adjust it. I tried the Quicktime streaming settings mentioned above and they had no effect, even when set to "56k modem." On the plus side, it resizes the screen instead of giving scrollbars, which can be very handy for large displays.
Anyhow, the answer is "You cannot speed up screen sharing, but you can run OSXvnc (Vine Server) and COTVNC with low bit depth and get a huge speedup."

I appreciate all of these options, and I'm working through them now.

This whole situation is really a drag however, as I am accessing my MBP over gigabit Ethernet... All Windows-to-Windows VNC solutions FLY, but connecting to the MBP looks like dial-up.

-Travis

I was mistaken!

As it turns out, my MBP was connecting to the switch at 100mbit instead of gigabit, a problem that it has from time to time and I hadn't noticed this time.

After correcting that, I found that the built-in screen sharing works perfectly smoothly when connecting from a Windows machine with RealVNC viewer. Running VNC Server Enterprise on the Mac results is POORER performance by far.

I stand corrected. For me, everything works perfectly on a gigabit LAN.

-Travis

EDIT: I'm talking about full-speed screen animations such as the dock and spaces. I can't even tell that it's remote.

Message was edited by: Travis B

Glad to hear you have it sorted.



10:14 PM Thursday; May 7, 2009

Please, if posting Logs, do not post any Log info after the line "Binary Images for iChat"