Setting up an analog RDP server on Mac OS X (solving problems with sound transmission)

What is this article about?

I want to talk about how you can achieve remote transmission of system sounds (in addition to the image) on Mac OS X. As you know, image transfer and remote control of a Mac computer is not difficult: you tick the "general screen" checkbox in the "sharing" ", Put the password on the VNC, connect using any VNC client (for example, RealVNC in the" Full colors "mode) and that's it, you can work. The same can be said about SSH: check the box “remote login” and get access via SSH.

How are things going with the sound?

Sound transmission in MacOS X is not provided by default. At least I have not found easy ways to turn it on. Therefore, I propose to transmit sound separately. With the help of some third-party program, which, for example, can be a server of an Internet radio station. I found several such programs, and one of them is Nicecast . It is paid, unfortunately, but the trial version only includes noise after 20 minutes of broadcast, otherwise it works as well as the full one.

What does this program give?

With Nicecast, you can stream the sound of a specific application (iTunes, Quicktime), sound from a microphone, and system sounds . The last item requires the installation of the Soundflower library, but it is included in the distribution, so there should be no installation problems (you can uninstall the library from the Nicecast menu item -> Install Extras ...). In the main window of the program, click on the Share button, and select "System audio", the program will automatically offer to install the soundflower driver. After that you can start broadcasting by clicking "Start broadcasting"


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In fact, you can already get to work by running any of the players that support the connection to the URL. Open http: // your_ip_address : 8100 / listen.m3u on another computer, then connect to your computer via VNC. You are likely to sense some delay in the transmission of sound, usually a couple of seconds. Set the minimum (but not zero) buffering of the Internet stream in your player, and the delay should fall to ~ 0.5 sec. I want to note that on a high-speed local network, the sound is transmitted very smoothly, without jerks, as is usually the case with RDP. You can also play games like Civilization or SPORE on a remote computer if you have a high-speed network [usually 100 Mbps is not enough for games :(].

Access limitation

You may have a question - how not to let everyone listen to the sound on your computer? The answer is the following: in the top menu, you can select Window -> Show server, or simply press Cmd + 2, and the server management window will appear in front of you.

If you need simple protection - just put the number of listeners in 1 person, and turn on Nicecast after you log into the computer via VNC. If you want more sophistication, you can specify only 127.0.0.1 as the server IP address and connect to the sound server using an SSH tunnel (remember, we turned on the SSH server :)? In this topic there is an example of creating an SSH tunnel.

Screencast

For those who wish, I recorded a 14-minute screencast, explaining and clearly demonstrating what was written above.

Screencast in quicktime format