Vine Viewer 3.0 Slow -- Needs Support for Tight Encoding

I have been testing various VNC Viewers with Vine Server 3.0 (including Chicken of the Sea, RealVNC viewer, Vine viewer and Tight VNCviewer).

Vine Viewer works just fine but I find it to be one of the slowest viewers out there over a broadband link. (This is too bad since I really would like to cut and paste files to a Vine Server which is only possible with Vine Viewer).

In my experience, one of the fastest viewers (used with Vine Server) is the Free Java viewer from TightVNC. (You must launch the viewer from the command line so it is not the most user friendly for Mac users).

I suspect that one of the main reasons for the speed of the TightVNC viewer is its support for the Tight encoding. Over typical cable broadband connections, I have found that Tight encoding followed by Zlib encoding provide the fastest response times. (It is my understanding that Tight is just an enhanced version of Zib).

Please consider adding support for “Tight” encoding into the next release of Vine Viewer. “Tight” encoding is just awesome for VNC.

Thanks for the feedback. Actually the “Tight” encoding is a different beast than Zlib in that it uses JPG compression. This is one of the reasons it’s good for broadband connections.

But, we’ll certainly consider that request.

Thanks Jonathan.

You may want to download and try the TightVNC java viewer for UNIX. The UNIX binary works fine in Mac but you must launch it from the CLI. (e.g java -jar vncviewer.jar HOST localhost).

Even with RAW encoding connecting to a server on the same machine, the tightVNC viewer is a lot faster than Vine Viewer. I am not sure what they are doing to make it faster. After all it is just a Java program :slight_smile: But you may want to take a look.

Of course, Vine Viewer has a lot of premium features (like copy / paste files. recording movies, scale to fit etc) that the ToghtVNC Viewer lacks.

Rob