TightVNC is Your Media Center Remote Desktop Answer
By Tim Coyle |
December 8th, 2005
Comments (2)
In a previous post on my blog, I talked about trying to setup remote desktop on my Media Center PC, but I just couldn’t get it to work. After some searching, I found TightVNC that is a free remote desktop application available for Windows. Install and setup was a breeze, and I was up and running in under 5 minutes. This is a great little program. So, if you can’t get remote desktop to work, then try this out. And I really hope that Microsoft is going to change how remote desktop works in Vista Media Center. If people are going to be hooking their home theater up to their PC, then they will need another way to conveniently run maintenance and upgrades on their home theater PC.
December 8th, 2005 at 11:12 am
VNC is a solid alternative to Remote Desktop, but you shouldn’t need it within the scope of your home network. Remote Desktop should integrate seemlessly accross your network in terms of access to the Media Center machine. You can browse the guide, schedule programs and of course perform all the standard Windows XP tasks. You can even play music across your local network through Remote Desktop. The only thing that won’t work via Remote Desktop is video playback in the Media Center interface. Not too long ago I did a fairly detailed writeup on setting up RDC for access from outside your home, but all the steps leading up to port forwarding are applicable to the configuration inside your home network:
How to setup Remote Desktop
Jake Ludington
http://www.jakeludington.com
http://www.sync2play.com
December 9th, 2005 at 11:31 pm
Thanks for the reply and info. I agree that Remote Desktop provides a much better experience but when it doesn’t work out of the box (whether due to my error or not) then VNC is a great solution. After talking with Ed Bott, it might be the fact that I had a Media Center extender installed that was giving me issues.