Picture quality

A remote desktop has to make one trade over and over: keep the picture moving, or keep it exact. GaiaDesk lets you say which side of that trade this computer should lean to, under Settings → Picture on the host.

The setting belongs to the computer being controlled, not to the person connecting — it is that machine's owner who knows whether it is a workstation full of code and spreadsheets or the machine the video review happens on.

Smooth video

The default, and what GaiaDesk has always done. The screen is encoded as video, using the graphics hardware where there is any. Motion is fluid, the frame rate holds up on a thin connection, and fine detail — small text especially — is softened a little to make that possible.

Choose it for video, animation, design work with moving previews, games, and anything where a dropped frame is more annoying than a slightly soft letter.

Smooth video from a Mac to the desktop app

When the computer being controlled is a Mac and you connect from the GaiaDesk desktop app, smooth video takes GaiaDesk's fastest path: the Mac's hardware video encoder, sent straight to your app's hardware decoder over its own connection. Everything else in the session goes over that same connection: chat, the shared clipboard, sending and fetching files, the file browser, the remote terminal, port forwarding and screenshots. The host's permission switches, your organisation's clipboard and file-transfer policy, and the rules for agent sessions apply exactly as they do on any other connection.

Two exceptions:

• Recording is not available on this path. The recorder saves the video stream the page receives, and on this path the app decodes and draws the video itself, so the page has no stream to save. The Record control says so. To record, connect from a browser or set the host's Picture to Sharp text.

• A host running an older GaiaDesk only sends video over this path. Chat, clipboard, files and the terminal won't reach it until the host is updated, and the terminal tells you so when you try it. Video and control work as usual.

Sharp text

Sends only the parts of the screen that actually changed, and sends them exactly. Text and interfaces arrive pixel for pixel as they are on the far screen — no softening, no shimmer around letters as the encoder catches up.

A still screen costs almost nothing to send, so a terminal or an editor that nobody is touching uses a trickle of bandwidth rather than a steady stream.

When something on screen starts moving — a video, a fast scroll, a window being dragged — GaiaDesk notices within a frame and hands the picture back to the video encoder by itself, then takes it back when things settle. You do not have to switch anything.

Choose it for terminals, editors, spreadsheets, remote administration, and anything where you are reading rather than watching.

When sharp text is not used

Sharp text needs a direct connection to a single controller, so GaiaDesk falls back to smooth video — without dropping the session — in two cases:

• Several devices are connected at once. Everyone in a multi-device session is served by one shared encoder, and a shared encoder sends video. If you use Settings → Multiple devices, expect smooth video.

• The controller is too old to draw it. A controller from before this feature existed is sent ordinary video rather than something it cannot paint.

Either way the host writes one line in its log saying which it was, so a session that looks softer than you expected has an answer rather than a mystery.

Changing it

The choice applies to the next connection. A session already running keeps the picture it started with — reconnect to see the change.

If this computer also runs the unattended background service, GaiaDesk will offer to repair that service after you change the setting. Take the offer: until you do, the machine would send a different picture depending on whether the app or the background service answered the door.