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[Kev06]

I have a laptop running Media Center 28 on current Debian stable with openbox, and then installed tigerVNC on this in order to access it remotely. I find that if I use TigerVNC's scraping-server (that essentially shares the existing screen) MC opens as normal. But if I use the normal/stand-alone VNC server, MC opens only as a completely blank window - it is the only application I have that does this.

Unfortunately the normal VNC server (that I believe creates a second virtual display session) seems to have less lag, so it would be preferable. I might also at some point swap to a completely headless machine, so not have a normal screen to share.

I'm not a very advanced linux user so apologies if my terminology isn't accurate; I tried a search but may not be using the right words. Is this expected behaviour for JRiver, or am I doing something wrong?

Many thanks,
Kev

[audiolover]

I use Teamviewer to access my audiopc remotely, that works like a charm. In order to make TV work properly you need to disable "play audio" in its settings menu.
For personal use TV is free.

[Kev06]

Thanks for chipping in. Yes, I guess other options for remote connection could be useful in future, so good to know that teamviewer works for you!

For now though, normal VNC is working very well with everything except media centre so I'd first like to understand a bit more about that and if it is easy to address or not.  MC isn't the machine's main function, so not really wanting to disturb too much else about the setup at the moment.

Thanks,
Kev

[mwillems]

So I recall having exactly your issue; there was an issue with all white windows when using TightVNC or TigerVNC virtual VNC desktops (but not VNC sharing of the actual screen), and I can't recall if it was ever resolved.  I switched to using x11vnc (which shares an existing screen) and later RealVNC both of which worked, so unfortunately I stopped following the issue so I don't know if it was ever resolved.  If you have access to RealVNC, you might want to try it as I recall it both worked with MC and was more performant than TigerVNC.  Alternatively, you might want to try x11vnc to see if its performant enough for you.

Bottom line this may be an issue that was never resolved (i.e. it may be a known bug). 

[HaWi]

Second that. I am also using RealVNC both, for my rPi and the MacBook Pro that I am using to serve MC remotely and locally respectively, and it works like a charm.

[Kev06]

Thank you both, that is very helpful and useful to hear; at least it is a known thing then, I wasn't sure if it was simply just my ineptitude.

On the strength of this I did some more forum searching and found passing references to using a dummy x-server  - that was on headless setups, which isn't quite the situation here, but may be some kind of answer possibly, if one knew how to sort it all out. 

Yes, realVNC is rather good, but I think there were some issues with even the free version needing to access their licence servers which (on my setup) it can't necessarily do. But having done some more tests, forwarding by x11vnc, x2go's screen-sharing extension, and TigerVNC's scraping server all seem to share the existing/real screen so I'll probably go with one of those for now, whenever I want to use MC. If I decide to move to a headless machine or begin to use MC as the main software, I'll try to reconfigure things more optimally then.

Thank you again for the help, I don't entirely understand the details but do feel less vague about things now.
Cheers,
Kev

[bob]

Whatever VNC you use, MC requires 24 bit color support in the connection.

[Kev06]

Ah, thank you, bob. I honestly don't know what the default colour-depth is for TigerVNC's stand-alone server, but can imagine that it might well be different to the scraping server using the main screen.

I will have to investigate more at some point then. For now I'm getting used to the slight extra lag of the scraping-server; once acclimatised to that it works quite well as a means of control, so I'm slowly getting back into using MC and could well end up optimising things for it.

Thanks again,
Kev