skip to main content
research-article

High performance many-to-many intranet screen sharing with DisplayCast

Published:14 February 2014Publication History
Skip Abstract Section

Abstract

DisplayCast is a many to many Intranet screen sharing system. Its screen capture mechanism creates a sequence of pixmap images of the screen updates. Prior systems that used a similar approach were designed to operate over constrained wide-area networks and did not exploit the Intranet network conditions to achieve high capture rates. First we empirically analyzed the screen contents for a variety of scenarios. We showed that screen updates were sporadic with long periods of inactivity. When active, screens were updated at far higher rates than was supported by earlier systems. The mismatch was pronounced for interactive scenarios. Even during active screen updates, the number of updated pixels were frequently small. We showed that crucial information can be lost if individual updates were merged. When the available system resources could not support high capture rates, we showed ways in which updates can be effectively collapsed. Next, we investigate compression mechanisms for streaming these updates. Even while using a hardware encoder, lossy compressors such as H.264 were unable to sustain high frame rates. Though Zlib lossless compression operated within the latency and compression rate requirements, the compression efficiency was poor. By analyzing the screen pixels, we developed a practical transformation that significantly improved compression rates. DisplayCast incorporates these observations. It shares the processor and network resources required for screen capture, compression and transmission with host applications whose output needs to be shared. DisplayCast is agile and uses faster processing capability to achieve even higher performance. Our system components operate natively in Windows 7, Mac OS X and iOS and is deployed in a production setting. DisplayCast is released under a New BSD License.

References

  1. Apple. OS X Mountain Lion. http://www.apple.com/osx/.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  2. Omer Boyaci and Henning Schulzrinne. 2008. BASS Application sharing system. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia (ISM'08). 432--439. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ISM.2008.97 Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  3. CCITT Recommendation T.81 1992. Digital compression and coding of continous-tone still images - requirements and guidelines. CCITT Recommendation T.81, International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Geneva.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  4. Surendar Chandra and Maribeth Back. 2012. Faunus: A flexible middleware for specifying and managing multimodal, multiparty collaborations. In Proceedings of the ACM/IFIP/USENIX 12th International Middleware Conference (MIDDLEWARE'12). Article 4. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2405146.2405150 Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  5. Connected Intelligence. 2013. Inception of screen sharing report. Tech. rep. NPD Group, Port Washington, NY.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  6. DemoForge. DemoForge Mirage Driver (DFMirage video hook driver). http://www.demoforge.com/dfmirage.htm.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  7. Peter Deutsch. 1996. DEFLATE compressed data format specification version 1.3. RFC 1951. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  8. Charles D. Estes and Ketan Mayer-Patel. 2012. The n-dimensional display interface: A more elastic narrow waist for the display pipeline. In Proceedings of the Multimedia Systems Conference (MMSys'12). 119--129. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2155555.2155577 Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  9. Roy Thomas Fielding. 2000. Architectural styles and the design of network-based software architectures. Ph.D. Dissertation. UC Irvine.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  10. GLX. GLUT and OpenGL Utility Libraries. http://www.opengl.org/resources/libraries/glx/.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  11. David M. Hilbert, Thea Turner, Laurent Denoue, and Kandha Sankarpandian. 2008. Autonomous presentation capture in corporate and educational settings. In Proceedings of the International Association for Development of the Information Society (IADIS) e-Learning 2011 Conference (IADIS e-Learning'08). 239--246.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  12. Greg Humphreys, Matthew Eldridge, Ian Buck, Gordan Stoll, Matthew Everett, and Pat Hanrahan. 2001. WireGL: A scalable graphics system for clusters. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH'01). 129--140. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/383259.383272 Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  13. Intel laptop. Laptop to TV with Intel R_Wireless Display (WiDi). http://goo.gl/EnSjy.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  14. Intel. Intel Quick Sync Video. http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-technology/quick-sync-video/quick-sync-video-general.html.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  15. ITU. 2013. H.264: Advanced video coding for generic audiovisual services. ITU. http://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-H.264.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  16. Hwanju Kim, Jinkyu Jeong, Jaeho Hwang, Joonwon Lee, and Seungryoul Maeng. 2012. Scheduler support for video-oriented multimedia on client-side virtualization. In Proceedings of the Multimedia Systems Conference (MMSys'12). 5--76. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2155555.2155566 Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  17. Jean loup Gailly and Mark Adler. zlib: A massively spiffy yet delicately unobtrusive compression library. zlib.net.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  18. Microsoft Multimedia redirection improvements in Windows 7 and WS2008 R2. http://goo.gl/W7Uv4.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  19. Miracast. 2012. http://www.wi-fi.org/wi-fi-certified-miracast. (Sept. 2012).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  20. Microsoft Remote. Remote desktop connection. http://goo.gl/i5bqg.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  21. Tristan Richardson and John Levine. 2011. The remote framebuffer protocol. RFC 6143.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  22. Tristan Richardson, Quentin Stafford-Fraser, Kenneth R. Wood, and Andy Hopper. 1998. Virtual network computing. IEEE Internet Comput. 2, 1, 33--38. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  23. Samsung. 2012. Allshare InstantPlay. http://www.samsung.com/us/2012-allshare-play/. (2012).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  24. Uchino Satoshi. MetaVNC - a Window-aware VNC. http://metavnc.sourceforge.net/.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  25. Brian K. Schmidt, Monica S. Lam, and J. Duane Northcutt. 1999. The interactive performance of SLIM: a stateless, thin-client architecture. In Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP'99). 32--47. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/319151.319154 Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  26. Stream movies and music wirelessly with AirPlay. http://www.apple.com/ipad/features/airplay/.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  27. Yang Sun and Teng-Tiow Tay. 2008. Analysis and reduction of data spikes in thin client computing. J. Parallel Distrib. Comput. 68, 11, 1463--1472. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  28. Jennifer Teig von Hoffman. 2001. Guide to Distributed PowerPoint. Boston University.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  29. Grant Wallace and Kai Li. 2007. Virtually shared displays and user input devices. In Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference'07. 375--380. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  30. WHDI. Wireless home digital interface. www.whdi.org.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  31. Windows 8. Windows 8 release preview. http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/release-preview.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  32. Windows Mirror. Windows mirror drivers. http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/ff568315.aspx.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  33. Hee Cheol Yun, Brian K. Guenter, and Russell M. Mersereau. 1997. Lossless compression of computer generated animation frames. ACM Trans. Graph. 16, 4, 359--396. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/263834.263835 Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  34. Zeroconf/ Zero Configuration Networking. http://www.zeroconf.org/.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  35. Jacob Ziv and Abraham Lempel. 1977. A Universal Algorithm for Sequential Data Compression. IEEE Trans. Info. Theory 23, 3, 337--343. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library

Index Terms

  1. High performance many-to-many intranet screen sharing with DisplayCast

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Login options

    Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

    Sign in

    Full Access

    • Published in

      cover image ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications
      ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications  Volume 10, Issue 2
      February 2014
      142 pages
      ISSN:1551-6857
      EISSN:1551-6865
      DOI:10.1145/2579228
      Issue’s Table of Contents

      Copyright © 2014 ACM

      Publisher

      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      • Published: 14 February 2014
      • Accepted: 1 September 2013
      • Revised: 1 May 2013
      • Received: 1 November 2012
      Published in tomm Volume 10, Issue 2

      Permissions

      Request permissions about this article.

      Request Permissions

      Check for updates

      Qualifiers

      • research-article
      • Research
      • Refereed

    PDF Format

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader
    About Cookies On This Site

    We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website.

    Learn more

    Got it!