[v2,0/6] Add VNC Open H.264 Encoding

Message

Dietmar Maurer April 10, 2025, 11:22 a.m. UTC

As defined by:

https://github.com/rfbproto/rfbproto/blob/master/rfbproto.rst#open-h-264-encoding

The noVNC HTML application recently added support for this encoding. There is
also an open pull request to add audio support to noVNC:

https://github.com/novnc/noVNC/pull/1952

With that in place, the web based VNC console is good enough to display
a VM showing a video with reasonable bandwidth.

Possible improvements:

- Dynamic switching to/from H264 mode at high change rates
- Support for hardware encoders

We may also extend the RFB Audio protocol with "opus" encoding, because uncompressed
audio need too much bandwidth.

Changes in v2:

- cleanup: h264: remove wrong libavcodec_ prefix from function names
- search for available h264 encoder, and only enable h264 if a
  encoder is available
- new vnc option to configure h264 at server side


Dietmar Maurer (6):
  new configure option to enable gstreamer
  add vnc h264 encoder
  vnc: h264: send additional frames after the display is clean
  h264: remove wrong libavcodec_ prefix from function names
  h264: search for available h264 encoder
  h264: new vnc option to configure h264 at server side

 meson.build                   |  10 +
 meson_options.txt             |   2 +
 scripts/meson-buildoptions.sh |   5 +-
 ui/meson.build                |   1 +
 ui/vnc-enc-h264.c             | 335 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 ui/vnc-jobs.c                 |  49 +++--
 ui/vnc.c                      |  62 ++++++-
 ui/vnc.h                      |  29 +++
 8 files changed, 476 insertions(+), 17 deletions(-)
 create mode 100644 ui/vnc-enc-h264.c