Audio over Terminal Services

[Earthling]

 

Morning everyone,

 

We have a small TS network, which I am looking to enlarge as our pc's come up for rolling replacement. We need to start providing audio and possibly better quality video so that Terminal Services will be more viable for MFL etc.

 

Anyone got any advice on hardware, sound cards, gfx cards etc? Anyone got any experiences they would share?

 

Network is fibre to all blocks, but with some cable-runs being up to 500 metres. Switches are a mixture of Foundry Core and Edge switches and HP Procurves.

 

TIA

[jamesfed]

Have a look at RemoteFX in Server 2008R2 SP1 - its the only thing (besides Citrix HDX Pro) that can use a graphics card (that I know of) in a TS style enviroment.

[dhicks]

Have a look at RemoteFX in Server 2008R2 SP1

 

Thanks, that looks useful. Does it cost extra?

 

We seemed to have relative success installing just plain Windows Serve 2008 R2 and connecting with Linux-based clients running rdesktop (RDP 5.1) - the clients seemed to be able to manage YouTube video with sound okay. Those were newer clients, though - brand new (£200) Acer Revos. Older PCs used as clients didn't work as well, the graphics hardware simply couldn't keep up and video / audio got out of sync. Running Windows XP with an RDP 7 client on the same hardware didn't seem to have any effect on performance, though - the client hardware simply had to be up-to-date enough.

 

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David Hicks

[jamesfed]

I think you need to have 2k8 TS licences but nothing else is required - all the same though as its SP1 (not released yet) that could well change.

If you have the hardware spare put together a 2008 R2 Terminal Server with SP1 (download the beta) and run a few test sessions on it and see if the software works for you.

The only requirement on the client end is RDP 7.1 (which I belive rdesktop dosn't support yet).

[dhicks]

I think you need to have 2k8 TS licences but nothing else is required - all the same though as its SP1 (not released yet) that could well change. If you have the hardware spare put together a 2008 R2 Terminal Server with SP1 (download the beta) and run a few test sessions on it and see if the software works for you.

 

Good plan, I'll look in to that, thanks.

 

The only requirement on the client end is RDP 7.1 (which I belive rdesktop dosn't support yet).

 

"Yet" as in it's planning too? I didn't think rdesktop was being developed any further. Any Windows XP machine (including XP home, if I understand correctly) can act as an RDP 7 client, though - anyone any idea whether Windows XP's RDP client will support RDP 7.1 and fancy new RemoteFX features?

 

--

David Hicks

[jamesfed]

"Yet" as in it's planning too? I didn't think rdesktop was being developed any further. Any Windows XP machine (including XP home, if I understand correctly) can act as an RDP 7 client, though - anyone any idea whether Windows XP's RDP client will support RDP 7.1 and fancy new RemoteFX features?

 

I saw a video where a Microsoft guy said he had three thin clients one of which was running a 'Non Windows OS' (aka Linux) which had RemoteFX working on so I would be surprised if they don't update Windows XP to 7.1 (as you said it only works with 7.0 at the moment).

[dhicks]

I saw a video where a Microsoft guy said he had three thin clients one of which was running a 'Non Windows OS' (aka Linux)

 

After several conversations with user Axel on this forum, there seems to be some confusion as to what, exactly, constitutes an OS these days, so that demo could have been showing a thin client device running a written-from-scratch, Microsoft-licensed RDP client.

 

--

David Hicks

[jamesfed]

After several conversations with user Axel on this forum, there seems to be some confusion as to what, exactly, constitutes an OS these days, so that demo could have been showing a thin client device running a written-from-scratch, Microsoft-licensed RDP client.

 

I bet that was a good discussion!

Theres a few videos of the techonlogy on Youtube - YouTube - remotefx

and I think (I've not got any sound on my PC at the moment) heres the one with the 'Non microsoft OS' - RemoteFX in Server 2008 R2 SP1 with Michael Kleef

[SYNACK]

"Yet" as in it's planning too? I didn't think rdesktop was being developed any further. Any Windows XP machine (including XP home, if I understand correctly) can act as an RDP 7 client, though - anyone any idea whether Windows XP's RDP client will support RDP 7.1 and fancy new RemoteFX features?

 

At one point I did find a fork of rdesktop that was actually still being developed but they are still mostly in the code cleanup phase and have not got to RDP7 yet.

 

Whether XP will support it is not clear as (as i understand it) it offloads a chunk of stuff like aero to the client. This would mean implementing a chunk of the Vista/7 DWM on XP which has been something that they have not been keen on in the past. RFX does look great though and I am waiting for it expectantly especially for MPS 2010 because that will probably enable full aero desktop and acceleration for each of the directly connected clients hooked up to a halfway decent GPU.