I've thought a little about VNC, as we make rather extensive use of it around the (home) office here, as well as on the road around the world. Nice stuff.

But for the Empeg, we need something even simpler. The amount of data we're dealing with is small, but we need to keep CPU usage even smaller.

With packed-pixels format transmission, an entire loss-free image of the display goes out at 4 pixels to the byte, or basically 1KB -- less than a single ethernet frame, and very low CPU to generate it. It would be rather easy to write a UDP broadcaster that just dumps screen updates out onto the lan, at perhaps 5 frames/second refresh rate.

But apparently the big feature of DisplayServer (I've never even seen it once) is the client side app that draws the buttons and allows point-and-click for remote operation, as well as displaying the screen dumps from the unit. Somebody needs to (re)write that portion, or figure out Frank's protocol so we can continue using his Java client.

Getting the button-presses back into the Empeg is not difficult, either, just have a kthread listening on a UDP socket, and passing the codes directly into the IR handler (which has been taken over by Hijack nowadays).

Anybody wanna write a client, or reverse-engineer the protocol that Frank used?
The player side (kernel) is the easy part (for me).

Cheers