Achieve greener technology, major cost reduction, and full legal compliance with our daas-based solutions. These proven enhancements guarantee higher end-user satisfaction and seamless server offloading.
Fluendo brings focused engineering expertise to the DaaS and VDI industry. This deep history translates directly into reliable, high-performance virtual desktop multimedia solutions trusted worldwide.
Our products have been deployed across millions of endpoints, demonstrating both scale and stability in diverse enterprise infrastructure. As a Citrix and Omnissa certified partner, we guarantee seamless audio and video playback compatibility across all virtualized environments.
Fluendo brings focused engineering expertise to the DaaS and VDI industry. This deep history translates directly into reliable, high-performance virtual desktop multimedia solutions trusted worldwide.
Our products have been deployed across millions of endpoints, demonstrating both scale and stability in diverse enterprise infrastructure. As a Citrix and Omnissa certified partner, we guarantee seamless audio and video playback compatibility across all virtualized environments.
our case studies
Developments that bring real-world results, these case studies show how our solutions help your business achieve goals and enhance user experiences.
The recent surge in global teleworking intensified the market demand for robust DaaS & VDI solutions. A critical issue emerged from the continuous use of video conferencing applications (such as Zoom and Teams), which generated excessive bandwidth consumption, particularly when transmitting uncompressed, raw camera streams. This bandwidth bottleneck degraded the overall user experience and strained corporate networks.
To address this situation, the primary DaaS & VDI service providers implemented a feature to reduce network load by processing and compressing video directly on the endpoint before transmission.
Leading manufacturer of DaaS & VDI endpoints, such as Dell and HP, required an integrated video optimization solution compatible with existing webcam offloading features to replace raw video streams with compressed, high-quality ones. This solution must be legally compliant and highly optimized for the endpoints’ hardware capabilities. Fluendo became the ideal partner, recognized for its expertise in multimedia technologies and codec licensing.
The solution was to implement a high-performance H.264 encoder and integrate it directly into the endpoint. This encoder compresses the raw video stream into the efficient H.264 format before it is transmitted across the network.
The solution offered both a pure software encoder and a hardware-accelerated version optimized for common endpoints’ GPUs. This hardware acceleration offloaded the heavy encoding task from the CPU, freeing up critical resources on the endpoint.
Fluendo guaranteed that all H.264 codecs were fully licensed by MPEG LA, ensuring legal compliance. The solution was also built for seamless integration with existing VDI infrastructure, such as Citrix’s webcam redirection functionality, without requiring vendors to modify established protocols.
Achieved significant bandwidth reduction for continuous video calls in VDI environments
Optimized video encoding to leverage GPU resources, drastically reducing CPU load
Ensured H.264 licensing compliance, simplifying deployment for enterprise clients
Delivered real-time webcam video encoding directly on the thin client
Achieved significant bandwidth reduction for continuous video calls in VDI environments
Optimized video encoding to leverage GPU resources, drastically reducing CPU load
Ensured H.264 licensing compliance, simplifying deployment for enterprise clients
Delivered real-time webcam video encoding directly on the thin client
In typical Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and Desktop as a Service (DaaS) setups, the server handles all video processing—downloading, decoding, and rendering multimedia content before encoding and streaming the recorded display to the endpoint. This process resulted in high CPU/GPU load on the server, increased network bandwidth consumption, and user-facing issues like latency and poor-quality, choppy video playback. To address this situation, the primary DaaS & VDI service providers implemented what is known as MMR (Multimedia Redirection) to offload the decoding process from the server to the endpoint.
A leading manufacturer of DaaS & VDI endpoints required us to support the standard MMR protocols found in the industry, like HTML5 multimedia redirection, Windows Media redirection, Browser content redirection, etc. This solution must be legally compliant and highly optimized for the endpoints’ hardware capabilities to efficiently decode multimedia content, with low-latency playback and minimal hardware requirements.
The implemented solution involved integrating the Fluendo Codec Pack into the operating systems of various client endpoints, including Linux, Windows, IGEL OS, and Dell Wyse ThinOS. Crucially, the Fluendo Codec Pack included hardware acceleration plugins, leveraging the client device’s GPU horsepower to substantially reduce CPU load during audio and video content processing. This move guaranteed that client devices possessed optimized and fully licensed codecs for key industry formats, such as H.264 (including patent license compliance), MPEG-4, AAC, or MP3. Leveraging Fluendo’s specialized knowledge in GStreamer and multimedia experts, the codecs were specifically tuned for low-power thin client hardware, ensuring that the local decoding and rendering process was resource-efficient and fast.
By allowing the client to download and process the raw multimedia stream locally, the solution effectively bypassed the need for the VDI server to perform intensive video processing and recoding. This architectural refinement delivered multiple benefits: a reduction of load in the server (enabling greater user density), a better quality of video/audio for the end-user (achieving fluid HD/4K playback), and full legal compliance by managing the necessary patent licensing. The integration ensured interoperability with major VDI protocol vendors, including Citrix, Omnissa, Microsoft, and others.
Enabled smooth HD/4K video playback on thin clients
Significantly reduced server CPU/GPU load for VDI sessions
Ensured full patent license compliance for widely used codecs
Optimized codec performance on low-power client hardware
Enabled smooth HD/4K video playback on thin clients
Significantly reduced server CPU/GPU load for VDI sessions
Ensured full patent license compliance for widely used codecs
Optimized codec performance on low-power client hardware
A major endpoint manufacturer faced a critical multimedia challenge when the browsers installed on the device were used for multimedia playback in a DaaS & VDI session, when accessing essential business tools, including SaaS platforms and collaborative applications.
Most of the browsers included on the endpoints are Chromium-based, the open-source base for popular browsers like Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge.
The main technical challenge centered on Chromium’s default multimedia limitations. Due to licensing restrictions, the pure, open-source Chromium project does not natively include proprietary codecs such as H.264 for video and AAC for audio. This exclusion prevented users from playing standard multimedia content, directly impacting the platform’s utility and user experience. Furthermore, Chromium utilizes FFmpeg as its primary multimedia framework for multimedia playback; however, this version is a Chromium-only, specific version bundled within the browser itself.
The client required a seamless, legal, and compatible solution to enable H.264 and AAC playback within their Chromium distribution and the specific FFmpeg bundled version.
Fluendo’s expertise in multimedia consulting, GStreamer, and FFmpeg integration was essential to deliver a specialized, legally-compliant, and high-performance multimedia solution for their VDI users.
Fluendo’s solution involved a dual-component strategy:
This successful integration provided a robust, legally-compliant solution that allowed VDI users of major endpoint manufacturers (such as Dell, HP, among others) to seamlessly play web content requiring H.264 and AAC, thus solving the multimedia deficiency and enhancing the user experience.
Delivered pre-validated FFmpeg Enabler for Chromium for immediate operational use
Enabled full, legal playback of H.264 and AAC multimedia in Chromium-based VDI environments
Achieved universal support for proprietary video and audio formats like H.264 and AAC
Delivered pre-validated FFmpeg Enabler for Chromium for immediate operational use
Enabled full, legal playback of H.264 and AAC multimedia in Chromium-based VDI environments
Achieved universal support for proprietary video and audio formats like H.264 and AAC
our use cases
These use cases present conceptual examples of how our ideas and technologies could address real-world industry challenges.
Enterprises operating DaaS & VDI environments face reduced meeting efficiency when global teams communicate across diverse accents, speech rates, and noisy environments. Standardizing speech clarity at the DaaS audio entry point would address comprehension gaps, repeat-backs, and longer call times while maintaining privacy and desktop performance, improving productivity and satisfaction.
Fluendo’s AI native-like voice enhancement toolset would operate as a virtual microphone on the user’s device, performing real-time noise suppression, voice enhancement, accent translation, and tone adjustment.
The enhanced audio stream would then be delivered into the DaaS & VDI session via standard microphone redirection (e.g., RDP/HDX/Blast), where any communication or meeting application would receive a clear, low-latency audio stream without requiring changes or additional setup.
For lower-performance or GPU-limited devices, a virtual recording component within the DaaS & VDI environment could provide the same processing capabilities server-side.
Leveraging Fluendo’s Multimedia Edge AI technology and Raven AI engine, this approach would emphasize Edge AI, real-time processing, and portability via GStreamer components to fit browser, Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS and Android endpoints.
Enhance communication clarity across global teams
Seamless integration with the native OS, DaaS & VDI protocols, and conferencing applications
Maintain privacy and regulatory compliance
Enhance communication clarity across global teams
Seamless integration with the native OS, DaaS & VDI protocols, and conferencing applications
Maintain privacy and regulatory compliance
Businesses are unable to deploy graphically-intensive applications like CAD, medical imaging, or video editing via DaaS to remote workers on consumer-grade internet. Traditionally, supporting these premium use cases requires high-cost infrastructure: dedicated high-bandwidth network connections for each user and powerful, expensive server-side GPUs for real-time video encoding. This complexity makes scaling high-performance remote work financially unviable.
Fluendo’s AI-powered superresolution plugin would operate entirely on the client side to dynamically enhance video feeds, upscaling desktop content up to 4K resolution. The system would intelligently adapt to input video quality and integrate seamlessly with the DaaS protocol, native OS, browsers, and applications.
This approach would fundamentally decouple the end-user’s visual quality from network or server performance. It would remove the dependency on high-bandwidth connections and dramatically reduce the reliance on costly server-side GPU encoding, allowing businesses to deliver a premium experience over a standard internet connection.
Offload image enhancement to the client endpoint, increasing user density and avoiding expensive server-side GPU and network infrastructure upgrades
Artifact-free visual experience with sharp text and fine graphical detail that rivals local desktop performance
Improve remote workers’ efficiency and reduce visual fatigue
Optimized for low-end thin clients, enabling new, highly graphical, demanding remote user cases
Offload image enhancement to the client endpoint, increasing user density and avoiding expensive server-side GPU and network infrastructure upgrades
Artifact-free visual experience with sharp text and fine graphical detail that rivals local desktop performance
Improve remote workers’ efficiency and reduce visual fatigue
Optimized for low-end thin clients, enabling new, highly graphical, demanding remote user cases
DaaS & VDI administrators currently lack a reliable, non-intrusive way to measure real-time video quality perceived by users. Traditional reference-based metrics (e.g., VMAF, PSNR, SSIM) require an original source stream that is unavailable in most production desktops, making live monitoring impractical.
Subjective methods (e.g., MOS following ITU BT.500/P.910) are costly, offline, and cannot operate continuously. Meanwhile, transport-level metrics (latency, loss, jitter, bitrate) do not consistently correlate with users’ visual experience, so degradations are detected late, after productivity and satisfaction have already dropped.
An approach that estimates perceived quality without a reference and runs continuously inside real environments would close this gap.
An AI model predicts reference-free video quality metrics (VMAF-like) directly from live desktop/video streams, enabling continuous QoS visibility and proactive anomaly detection.
The capability would be provided as a modular software library and a Fluendo AI GStreamer plugin using Raven AI Engine for inference, so that it could be embedded at the endpoint, broker, or server, and exported to existing observability stacks
The model would be trained to correlate strongly with human judgments and well-known objective metrics (such as VMAF), and validated across common DaaS workloads (text editors, spreadsheets, 3D tools, conferencing) to remain content-aware and low-overhead for real-time operation.
Real-time visibility into user-perceived video quality
Seamless integration with existing monitoring tools. No reference video required
Automatic detection of quality degradation
Scalable and content-aware QoS measurement
Real-time visibility into user-perceived video quality
Seamless integration with existing monitoring tools. No reference video required
Automatic detection of quality degradation
Scalable and content-aware QoS measurement
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.
Our solution, built specifically for the remote desktop environment, will tap directly into the virtualized operating system’s window management APIs to understand the desktop composition in real-time. It will identify window boundaries, classify content type (text, graphics, video), and track motion vectors as they occur.
This rich contextual information will then be fed directly to our RDCT video codec and AI-based enhancements. This will allow them to bypass much of their own costly analysis and instantly apply the perfect quality and compression level to each region, dedicating maximum resources to critical areas while conserving them on static parts of the screen.
Reduce the server computing OpEx and increase user density per server by enhancing only where/when is needed
Superior visual fidelity for desktop-specific content
Integration without any changes to your existing DaaS & VDI stack
High-performance remote work financially viable at scale
Reduce the server computing OpEx and increase user density per server by enhancing only where/when is needed
Superior visual fidelity for desktop-specific content
Integration without any changes to your existing DaaS & VDI stack
High-performance remote work financially viable at scale
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.
The proposed solution will explore integrating Screen Content Coding tools into Fluendo’s Remote Desktop Coding Tools technology stack. The objective is to evaluate how SCC techniques can improve the compression of desktop-oriented visual content, particularly in text-heavy interfaces, office applications, development environments, dashboards, browser sessions, and enterprise software.
The prototype could use a modern codec-experimentation framework to isolate SCC behavior and assess its impact on quality, bitrate, and encoding complexity. Rather than positioning a specific codec as the final product architecture, the innovation project should validate whether SCC concepts can be incorporated into a broader, codec-agnostic optimization toolkit for remote desktop streaming.
The solution may also consider desktop-specific signals from the operating system or remote desktop environment, such as changes to screen regions, window boundaries, application type, or areas with text and graphics. These signals could help the encoder make better decisions without relying only on generic video analysis.
By improving compression efficiency for desktop content, SCC would help DaaS & VDI providers reduce bandwidth consumption while maintaining a high-quality visual experience.
SCC would improve the perceived quality of remote desktop sessions by preserving text readability, sharp UI elements, graphics, and color consistency more effectively than generic video coding approaches.
More efficient desktop encoding would help providers support larger deployments, more concurrent sessions, or higher-resolution desktop experiences without a proportional increase in infrastructure load.
Developed as part of the codec-agnostic RDCT toolkit, SCC would be easier to integrate across different codecs, streaming protocols, and customer environments, reducing adoption friction.
By improving compression efficiency for desktop content, SCC would help DaaS & VDI providers reduce bandwidth consumption while maintaining a high-quality visual experience.
SCC would improve the perceived quality of remote desktop sessions by preserving text readability, sharp UI elements, graphics, and color consistency more effectively than generic video coding approaches.
More efficient desktop encoding would help providers support larger deployments, more concurrent sessions, or higher-resolution desktop experiences without a proportional increase in infrastructure load.
Developed as part of the codec-agnostic RDCT toolkit, SCC would be easier to integrate across different codecs, streaming protocols, and customer environments, reducing adoption friction.
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Read more about our work
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 6G-XR Open Call 3 grant to pioneer LCEVC-Powered holographic streaming
daas-vdi, gstreamer, codecs, lynxFluendo selected for 6G-XR grant to pioneer holographic streaming with LCEVC.
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.
Synthetic data generator for AI chroma upsampling
daas-vdi, codecs, multimedia-edge-aiEnhancing DaaS image sharpness with AI-driven chroma upsampling.