A specialized video codec for desktop remoting with reduced operational costs and improved user experience while remaining backward compatible with existing codecs and infrastructure.
Enhance quality of experience
Deliver high-resolution and -quality video over any network, regardless of bandwidth constraints.
Cost & carbon reduction
Reduce operational costs for streaming and encoding with an energy-efficient, greener codec reducing dependency on GPU-first infrastructure.
Legal & technical compliance
A business-ready solution with patent reporting and licensing, fully compatible with your tech stack and infrastructure.
Enhance quality of experience
Deliver high-resolution and -quality video over any network, regardless of bandwidth constraints.
Cost & carbon reduction
Reduce operational costs for streaming and encoding with an energy-efficient, greener codec reducing dependency on GPU-first infrastructure.
Legal & technical compliance
A business-ready solution with patent reporting and licensing, fully compatible with your tech stack and infrastructure.
Remote Desktop Coding Tools (RDCT) reduces operational costs while improving user experiences. The codec empowers service providers with a more competitive and profitable offering while remaining backward compatible with existing codecs and infrastructure.
It integrates state-of-the-art coding tools and patent management with a streamlined API, ensuring risk-free integration with existing remote desktop protocols while optimizing performance for service providers and end users.
Remote Desktop Coding Tools (RDCT) reduces operational costs while improving user experiences. The codec empowers service providers with a more competitive and profitable offering while remaining backward compatible with existing codecs and infrastructure.
It integrates state-of-the-art coding tools and patent management with a streamlined API, ensuring risk-free integration with existing remote desktop protocols while optimizing performance for service providers and end users.
Capability to encode YUV 4:2:0 sequences into H.264 bitstreams, ensuring compatibility with industry standards.
Capability to encode YUV 4:2:0 sequences into H.264 bitstreams, ensuring compatibility with industry standards.
Implements the enhancement layer using MPEG-5 Part 2 LCEVC, improving compression efficiency while reducing the encoding and decoding complexity of the base codec. Designed to be codec-agnostic, LCEVC enhances base codecs without modification, integrating with existing workflows and ensuring future-proof adaptability.
Implements the enhancement layer using MPEG-5 Part 2 LCEVC, improving compression efficiency while reducing the encoding and decoding complexity of the base codec. Designed to be codec-agnostic, LCEVC enhances base codecs without modification, integrating with existing workflows and ensuring future-proof adaptability.
Optimizes encoding parameters to achieve a better quality-to-bitrate ratio in desktop remoting scenarios compared to other general-purpose codecs.
Optimizes encoding parameters to achieve a better quality-to-bitrate ratio in desktop remoting scenarios compared to other general-purpose codecs.
Encapsulates all specialised coding tools, providing an intuitive, high-level interface for simplified integration.
Encapsulates all specialised coding tools, providing an intuitive, high-level interface for simplified integration.
Implements the RDCT encoder and decoder as GStreamer plugins, ensuring compatibility with existing multimedia frameworks and the Fluendo Codec Pack.
Implements the RDCT encoder and decoder as GStreamer plugins, ensuring compatibility with existing multimedia frameworks and the Fluendo Codec Pack.
Bring next-generation codec efficiency to common desktop streaming workloads while keeping server-side encoding lightweight and reducing reliance on dedicated GPU resources.
Bring next-generation codec efficiency to common desktop streaming workloads while keeping server-side encoding lightweight and reducing reliance on dedicated GPU resources.
our use cases
These use cases present conceptual examples of how our ideas and technologies could address real-world industry challenges.
DaaS & VDI platforms must continually optimize for performance, scalability, and user experience. These platforms face increasing challenges due to high-resolution content delivery, fluctuating network conditions, and the growing demand for cost-effective scalability.
Standard video codecs often present trade-offs between visual fidelity and bandwidth consumption or processing load. These trade-offs become more pronounced at scale, directly affecting infrastructure costs, session density, and quality of service. Remote Desktop Coding Tools (RDCT), a hybrid solution based on H.264 enhanced with MPEG-5 LCEVC and desktop domain coding optimizations (including desktop content entropy tuning, region-of-interest coding, and improved color management), would offer a flexible and integrable response to these challenges.
The use of RDCT across the DaaS and VDI value chain would enable vendors and integrators to meet enterprise demands for performance, reliability, and cost-efficiency without requiring significant infrastructure overhauls.
In modern DaaS & VDI infrastructures, maintaining visual accuracy is essential for professionals working with 2D and 3D design, photo and video editing, medical image analysis, and other color-sensitive applications. These workflows demand precise color reproduction, smooth gradients, and razor-sharp detail, attributes that directly impact perception, precision, and decision-making.
However, most remote desktop solutions still rely on YUV 4:2:0 chroma subsampling, which reduces color data by up to 75% to save bandwidth. While efficient, this approach introduces color bleeding and soft edges, making it harder to distinguish subtle tones and fine details, especially in text-heavy or design-centric use cases.
Delivering true 4:4:4 fidelity, where every pixel and color component is transmitted, typically increases data volume by 1.5× to 2× compared to standard 4:2:0 streams. Some “lossless” or dual-encoder implementations can even require up to 40× more bandwidth and dedicated GPU acceleration, severely limiting scalability in real-world enterprise or cloud environments.
Video encoders used in DaaS & VDI, even those with advanced Screen Content Coding (SCC) tools, must rely on computationally expensive intra- and inter-frame analysis of the video stream to understand the content’s complexity and motion, which consumes a significant amount of server-side CPU/GPU resources. This process is fundamentally inefficient for remote desktops because the encoder is working to deduce information that the virtualized operating system already knows intrinsically. This redundancy creates a direct and costly trade-off between visual quality and server density.
DaaS & VDI providers need to deliver responsive, high-quality desktop sessions across different network conditions while keeping bandwidth and infrastructure costs under control. This is especially challenging for desktop content, where text, icons, windows, application interfaces, sharp edges, and flat color areas behave differently from camera-captured video.
Traditional video codecs are often optimized for natural video, which can make them less efficient when encoding screen content. As a result, providers may need to use higher bitrates to preserve text readability, UI sharpness, and visual consistency, increasing transmission costs and potentially degrading the user experience in constrained network environments.
This innovation project explores whether Screen Content Coding tools can improve the efficiency and quality of remote desktop streaming. The working hypothesis is that SCC techniques can better represent desktop-specific visual patterns and therefore help DaaS & VDI platforms deliver clearer screen content at lower bandwidth and with acceptable encoding complexity. The prototype direction is aligned with exploring SCC integration into a DaaS/VDI-specific codec to evaluate quality and encoding efficiency.
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Read more about our work
Guided encoder search optimization for remote desktop streaming
daas-vdi, codecs, gstreamer, optimization, the-lab, open-source, remote-desktop-coding-tools, h266-vvc, lynxWe explored how operating-system dynamic region information can guide encoder search decisions, reducing unnecessary analysis for remote desktop streaming while preserving coding efficiency.
Screen Content Coding Tools for Remote Desktop Streaming
daas-vdi, codecs, ffmpeg, optimization, the-lab, open-source, remote-desktop-coding-tools, lynxWe used SVT-AV1 as an experimental vehicle to isolate Screen Content Coding tools and evaluate a codec-agnostic methodology for improving desktop streaming quality and efficiency in DaaS & VDI environments.
Benchmarking Remote Desktop Coding Tools for DaaS & VDI
daas-vdi, codecs, gstreamer, optimization, the-lab, remote-desktop-coding-tools, lynxWe used an automated benchmarking workflow to evaluate Fluendo’s Remote Desktop Coding Tools against common codec references for screen-content streaming, measuring compression efficiency, CPU cost, frame delay, and desktop-content suitability.
Fluendo awarded SPIRIT Open Call 2 grant: Introducing AIVATAR
daas-vdi, gstreamer, codecs, fluendo-codec-pack, fluendo-ai-plugins, remote-desktop-coding-tools, raven, lynxFluendo selected for SPIRIT grant to develop AI-powered avatar telepresence.