Most of you probably already have a remote desktop solution and we were getting by with various solutions like Anydesk and Teamviewer which were only ‘ok’. But we have a lot of macs so couldn’t use PCOIP or HP Boost.
Then I stumbled across Jump Desktop (jumpdesktop.com) and it’s been a game changer. You can get realtime playback with audio, sharp graphics (in full screen mode), really low latency (especially for painting and zooming in the batch schematic) and all the keyboard shortcuts work (if you tweak the settings a certain way…I think they changed the defaults recently so now it works out of the box).
Also, they just rolled out pen pressure support for Mac hosts / clients, which I helped to beta test and iron out some bugs. It works well but one caveat is that it’s not using a Wacom specific driver. They are using some generic pen pressure driver on the client end that sends to the mac server, so you can’t customize the pen pressure profile. Anyways, the important thing is that in Flame it works.
You can install the server on unlimited machines and you only get charged per User per month. You need Enterprise level ($19.99/user/month or $15.99/month if you pay in advance) to enable the pen pressure support.
Beside the speed and compatibility with Macs, I would say the other great thing about Jump is the admin web based console. Users can only access machines they are assigned to or a group of computers. The interface is really intuitive and easy.
Of course, this is all dependent on the speed of your internet bandwidth on the server and client side. But this really fills a need for Mac-centric companies. Also, it’s all software based and the devs are constantly adding new features like pen pressure and audio support.
I’m not getting any discounts or money from these guys. I wanted to share because it’s a great service.
going to try this been looking for a better way to remote into macs, nice! finally.
Update tried it: maximum I could get through a LAN connection was 30Mbit, fair enough but I have a lot of vsync issues, other than that it completely blows anydesk / Teamviewer out of the water but its still long ways to beat teradici and HP Z at least it its current state
…the results are great. The only downfall that I’ve experienced is that the Teradici PCoIP Software client for Mac isn’t great, because the whole thing is external the OS doesn’t know there’s an extender so you’ve got to find a work around with Cursorcerer to disable the local host cursor. This is of course not a problem when host cards are installed internally and drivers are involved, which tells the machine when and how to enable its local cursor. Not impossible, just clunky. But, the Zero client works flawlessly.
The Amulet Hotkey is just licensed PCoIP stuff from Teradici.
Thanks for the tip. Does the amulet pass through all the USB info? So a wacom tablet will have all the pen features on the remote machine? And theorectically, you can hook up a usb drive too right?
Yup. That’s how I do it. Stereo audio as well. Multiple monitors support. But stick to 1920x1080 or 2560x whatever. And you can connect usb devices and setup which types of devices to allow.
I’ve found that 30-50Mbps is good to reserve for it, and hope that you are in 40-50ms or faster for good interactivity.
It’s a delightfully simple setup that most would be able to figure out if you know basic networking.
It does get hard real fast if you have to negotiate changeable workstation assignments. If you have multiple hosts and multiple clients, you could set up each client to only accept connections from a particular MAC address. Think of it like a video router. If you need A video router because you’re changing daily or weekly machine assignments, you’ll need a broker and licenses for that and it’s ugly. But if you are in more of a patch panel situation where you can set it and forget an artist connected to a Mac for a few weeks or months, then the solution scales well.
All in your looking at around $2k for the external host and $1k for the Zero client per Mac.
I have been using tera and HP Z for a long while between Windows and Linux and both clients, even way before Covid, so for me it comes down to these conclusions for Linux hosts(centOS specifically)
Choices: Teradici Hostcard, Teradici software aka CloudAccess+ , HP Z Remote boost
-Teradici Hostcard:
- is complete garbage with a software client
- Is OK with a zero Client
- Zeroclient cant do VPN on its own
- Zeroclient hardware limited to certain wacom tables
- Zeroclient is expensive!
- Needs a pciE slot on host
-Hostcard is expensive
- hostcard makes using both Tera and Directly connected screens impossible
- Lots of black screens, annoying stuff, cant recommend
Teradici Software
- needs Quadro GPU on host to really work
- PcoIP “Ultra” really still is just h264 as far as I can tell…
- ULTRA needs quicksync, so intel GPU on client to work with PcoIP Ultra , xeons, AMD dont have that
- clumsy settings, just no options for anything all done by the host and not the users specific
needs…
- expensive but cheaper than HPZ when using a lot of licenses
- best user experience but its just BARELY better than HPZ, at least for my usecases.
HP Z remote boost
- Free when you have a HP machine, cant beat that
- Easy to install
- easy to setup
- some features like wacom pressure is a bit hit and miss
- audio can be a bit of a pain but its gotten better
- good client settings
- Performance is really good honestly, it just works, is stable and does what its supposed to
So generally I recommend HPZ remote boost, free trial cant go wrong and if you have a HP machine then there is no competition really.
When COVID first hit I tested Teradici (software only), RGS, and some other thing that had a really stupid name like Mechdyne.
Big problem with Teradici, it is made for basically headless workstations. So as Finn said you can’t use the local monitor and remote at the same time. But Ultra does seem to have better color fidelity than RGS. Teradici claims Ultra actually resolves to lossless. Which means when you are stopped on an image it sends a lossless signal. When you hit play, it compresses. RGS seems to be an 8bit 4:2:0 H.264 signal.
We settled on building our own “thin clients” and went with RGS. It has been flawless. We ended up replacing some of our older machine with Z stations, since it would basically be cheaper than buying individual RGS licenses for them.
Mechdyne was a total waste. I couldn’t even believe it was being offered as a product.
Did you ever find any specific details on their “HP3” codec ? AVC seems to be h264 but HP3 almost looks too good with text to be 4:2:0 but I am not sure at all, also dont know what exactly the “JPEG-LS” is under the hood in terms of chroma subsampling.
On pcoip-ULTRA the same thing applies: what codec is that actually, based on their marketing it sounds like h265 444 10bit but the documentation is all over the place as usual with teradici
" Expanded multi-codec architecture for third party codecs, including H.264/HEVC"
I never experienced this hit and miss, always a hundred percent miss for me.
There is any settings to play with to be able to get the pen pressure on HP Z remote even if it is unstable?
