What is the best client from Windows to Mac for VNC?

Question

I have been trying different clients from Vista and I am not having a great experience with them. If I leave them sit for a while they stall and I have to close and reconnect. I have been using both TinyVNC and RealVNC and they both have this problem. I switched from TinyVNC to RealVNC and I get better refresh rates but it still stalls. I think using copy/paste causes it to lock up as well.

VNC is built into MacOS X so there has to be a reliable client which would give me something like a Terminal Services experience which works great when I connect to Windows servers. I am surprised that this experience with the Mac has been so bad so far.

What are better clients that would provide a better experience?

Answer 1

Try the client from nomachine. I believe you can use this for VNC as well as nx sessions. IMHO, they make great stuff. Google has also just implemented the nx server, so maybe there is a mac version of it. Here is a getting started guide.

Answer 2

Maybe this is what you are looking for? http://rdesktop.darwinports.com/

Answer 3

I've had good luck with Terminals. We have several Windows Servers and OSX boxes to admin, Terminals keeps them all consolidated into one nice program.

Answer 4

UltraVNC is fairly feature packed and has been pretty bulletproof for all the uses I've had for it.

Answer 5

I use TightVNC and it seems to work okay as long as I don't do a bunch of copying and pasting on the windows PC, then it goes crazy :)

Answer 6

Update: Regarding the Freezing. I just had the same freeze happen from a MAcBook Pro (current gen with Snow Leopard) to a Mac Mini (current gen with Snow Leopard). The Screen Share utility has frozen on the laptop but clicks still make things open etc on the TV machine (HTPC). This is exactly what I saw when testing with VNC from Windows.

I kept the original answer, but it was targeted at other people, like me, who were having issues with lag from Win7 to a Mac (OS X) via VNC:

This is not a direct answer but I have solved my own Windows 7 -> OS X performance issues.

Short answer:
. Use RealVNC with ZRLE compression
. Turn off any desktop background. Select 'Solid Color' instead
. In RealVNC enable 'Rate-limit mouse move events' - this made a huge difference for me

After quite a lot of research + trial and error these seem to be the most optimal settings. Until testing for this post. I can confirm with Win7, RealVNC Viewer 4.1.3 and Snow Leopard that it still hangs if left unattended - the Mac itself was fine. Closing and re-opening the VNC Client was quick to do but is a pain. I have a vnc config file with password etc saved to my desktop so one double click got me back in.

My own issues were worse using XBMC which seems to do something strange with the video as the Windows machine's CPU shoots up from ~2% to 30%+ (all vncviewer.exe) when I start XBMC on the Mac. With the above settings Safari etc is lightening fast over VNC.

As part of this research I tried TightVNC, RealVNC and UltraVNC, playing with all their settings - only RealVNC can limit mouse events. Also RealVNC's documentation says ZRLE is the fastest, then Hextile then RAW. As you probably discovered color level must be 'Full' to talk to OS X (using 8 bit color is how we used to boost performance when using VNC over the internet). Playing with all the other options made little difference

Finally: RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) is very different to VNC. You will never see the same level of performance over anything but a fast local network.

Answer 7

The following configuration worked for me, although I experience a freeze after some idle time. I am just glad to get this much going for me, for now.

Windows XP or Windows 7 Mac OS X 10.6.4 (Mac Mini) => System Preferences -> Sharing -> Select SCREEN SHARING RealVNC viewer => FULL Color Level

Answer 8

@Paul Lockwood Thanks for the RealVNC settings. They're great. I've also had good luck w/ UltraVNC, but it feels squirrelier. I don't know of any way to rate limit the mouse in UltraVNC, and I think that's making the difference.

As far as the client hanging, I don't think it's from being left unattended. In my experience, the client hangs whenever you copy text on the local machine. If you're not expecting this, it can seem like it's just a timeout. When I disable sending and receiving clipboard changes, I've been able to leave VNC sessions up for hours. This is applicable to both RealVNC and UltraVNC.

One nasty side effect of this copy-hang bug is that it seems to also hang the VNC server on some versions of OS X Server. Needless to say, this is a total bummer, especially off-site. Running this command on the remote machine over SSH will restart the VNC server (and save your ass):

sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart -restart -agent