Remote Desktop
Industry-leading Remote Desktop Software offering ultra-low latency streaming.
Industry-leading Remote Desktop Software offering ultra-low latency streaming.
Remote Desktop Software is an application that allows you to control a remote computer using a local one.
The mouse and keyboard inputs from the controlling computer are captured and sent to the remote computer. In turn, the display video is sent back.
Similar to how Netflix streams movies to your screen, or how Spotify streams music to your device, Remote Desktop Software streams the video and audio of the remote computer.
It's critical the remote computer doesn’t feel as if it's being remotely controlled. That’s why we’ve built a true 1:1 desktop like feel at Softdrive using our proprietary technology.
Softdrive uses a custom networking protocol designed to deliver low-latency video data in a way that is secure, responsive to changes in the quality of the connection between the two devices, and synergizes with the ability to tune the video encoding process.
Transmitting data over the internet is a complicated process. Data could travel over various networks from different providers, through multiple routers, along coaxial cables, fiber optic cables, or wirelessly via radio waves. Data that is sent could take different paths to the same destination, or could be lost altogether due to a router being overloaded or some physical glitch. Because of this, most data that is transmitted over the internet uses TCP, an algorithm that was designed in the 70s and is baked into every modern operating system. TCP guarantees that data is delivered in the correct order over the internet by retransmitting lost data and approximating the available bandwidth.
TCP, however, leads to increased latency as it is a generalized protocol. Softdrive uses UDP, which offers no added reliability over how the internet works, as described above. In order to make that work, we've written our own networking protocol on top of UDP.
Depending on the circumstance, Softdrive will retransmit data that it detects as lost, or it will bake-in redundancy as part of the video encoding algorithm.
Softdrive can receive pieces of video data out of order and rearrange it.
Softdrive will detect your available bandwidth. TCP would reduce the sending rate when bandwidth is saturated, which is not desirable for video streaming. Softdrive will communicate available bandwidth to the video encoding layer, which will respond by increasing the amount of compression (reducing bitrate) or potentially changing resolution or refresh rate.
Softdrive transmits the pixels generated by the remote computer. This is a massive amount of data. Take an example of a 1080p resolution running at 60 frames per second:
Softdrive uses the same video encoding algorithms that power video streaming all over the internet, tuned for low latency. These video encoding algorithms are based off decades of engineering work, leverage studies of the human visual system, and use temporal and spatial trends in the video data, ultimately reducing the size of the data by 100-1000 times.
Modern graphics cards come with specialized hardware to run these algorithms for encoding (compression) and decoding (decompression). Softdrive always uses this dedicated hardware, offering several benefits: reducing load on the CPU (since it does not need to run the algorithms), improving latency by avoiding copying pixels since this dedicated hardware can run the algorithms on GPU memory instead of system memory, and improving post-processing latency by keeping data on the GPU and using GPU-accelerated post-processing.
Softdrive has a dedicated implementation for each GPU vendor (Intel, Nvidia, AMD) with custom tweaks to reduce latency even further.
We're offering world-class security backed by experts and continuous research to stay ahead of the curve. Being secure by default is another way we're helping you focus on your business priorities.
Softdrive's network layer also encrypts all data with forward secrecy and protects against threats such as replay attacks.
Ultimately, our network protocol results in a secure, reliable, and responsive experience.
Softdrive also licenses our remote desktop software as a standalone offering. There are 4 license classes:
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