Actual Information from the FreeRDP Project (Score 5, Informative)

Hi, I am Marc-Andre Moreau, founder and leader of the FreeRDP project. I was not directly involved with the FreeRDP Wayland backend. First, definitely take this backend as a first step. There is a *lot* more than can be done in the future, and I can tell you it has the potential to make your best dreams come true in terms of remote desktop. Here is a screencast I took about a month ago showing FreeRDP on Linux connecting to Windows 8 with RemoteFX, playing videos with sound smoothly: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUF8xPKBQJM Even if this is impressive at this point, it is just a fraction of what we're going after in the future. RemoteFX was introduced in RDP 7.1, and is what FreeRDP implements. It basically encodes everything on-the-fly for fast encoding on the server and fast decoding on the client. This means the videos played in that remote desktop session I've recorded are re-encoded to RemoteFX, they are not sent as H264. RDP also provides a functionality allowing the redirection of the compressed video stream for local decoding and playback, but from experience RemoteFX provides a better user experience. RDP may be a protocol designed by Microsoft, it is part of the Microsoft Open Specifications. The long term goal of the project is not to make it a "FreeRDP to Microsoft" technology, but really to make it a "FreeRDP to FreeRDP" technology, where high quality clients and servers will be available for all platforms in existence. Like it or not, RDP is an extremely powerful protocol that has all the potential necessary to compete with leading commercially-supported alternatives, except that this one is open specification and open source with FreeRDP. We are also considering the possibility of defining our own community extensions to the RDP protocol to fill in the gaps left by Microsoft. We currently have clients on Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Android and iOS. We have servers (still in their early stage) on Linux, Windows, Mac OS X and now Wayland. All of this is available under the Apache license. One common mistake about RDP is to compare only in terms of the core feature set, which is graphics remoting and input. RDP provides support for disk redirection, audio input and output redirection, multimedia redirection, smartcard redirection, printer redirection, usb device redirection, multitouch input, serial & parallel device redirection, etc. It has a very rich set of security features which we work very hard on supporting well (Network Level Authentication, TS Gateway, etc). As for graphics remoting, it is very elaborate in the RDP protocol, and it just keeps getting better with newer versions of the protocol. The next step for us is to jump on RDP8 support, which will bring many new features such as a progressive graphics codec, dynamic adaptation based on changing network conditions, a high performance codec for anti-aliased fonts, support for multitransport (TCP + UDP), enhanced support for WAN and higher-latency/low bandwith environments, etc. All of this can be brought to all platforms with the FreeRDP project, for the benefit of all. Brace yourselves, FreeRDP is coming.