[digicammad]

Hi, is there a VNC server available for a Raspberry Pi OpenElec XBMC setup? I want to be able to access the Pi XBMC desktop from my laptop so I can work on it even if it is not playing through a monitor/TV.

I've searched Google and the forums and it seems like this could be available but I can't see where to get the add-on from.

Thanks

Ian

[prkid]

Hi Ian,

I was able to find a couple of posts at the Openelec forum. There are add-ons for Openelec, yet, not for Openelec/XBMC running on Pi. Here are a couple of posts which you can track to see if things change over time. I also understand that there are ways to VNC to Pi with the other OS's. You'll have to read through the complete posts to get the overall picture of the development and add ons.


http://openelec.tv/forum/13-miscellaneou...te-desktop

http://openelec.tv/forum/128-addons/3477...4?start=24

Good Luck!

PRKid

btw, I am also trying to connect to Pi via Openelec.

[digicammad]

Thanks for the links.

[danversj]

In the Raspberry Pi forums, hanzelpeter has put together a VNC server that uses Dispmanx.

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewto...p?p=386480

Openelec doesn't use Dispmanx so it won't work with it, but you could probably use RaspBMC. I've certainly gotten it to work with Raspbian with XBMC installed and run in standalone mode (no X Server). At the moment it's slow and choppy in 640x480 mode.

This is not an add-on, you need to compile it yourself.

[danversj]

I was wrong in saying Openelec doesn't use Dispmanx - Dispmanx is the native rendering system of the Raspberry Pi GPU and as such can't be "bypassed". I took the dispmanx_vncserver binary that I compiled on Raspbian along with it's required library files and ran it on Openelec and it works! It's very slow if you have 1920x1080 resolution (mouse and keyboard didn't seem to work), but you get about 6-10 fps usng 720x480 resolution with 16bit color depth (mouse and keyboard works fine). You do get black flashes in the video playback on the locally-connected screen when the VNC server is running (i'm using composite video). With video playing, xbmc.bin is using 35% CPU and dispman_vncserver is using 20% CPU. In the forum topic I posted above there is talk of using hardware-accelerated h264 with it in future - that's a lot of work ahead but people seem keen to get it going.

[Chewiee]

Can you give us a walk though danversj at all? This I need!