1. Chicken Of The Vnc Mac Catalina
2. How To Use Chicken Of The Vnc

Redstone Software, though, makes an OS X VNC server called, simply enough, OSXvnc. There used to be quite a few Mac clients, but the only one I'm aware of with any recent activity is Chicken of the VNC (CotVNC). You may see another speed boost if you tell your VNC client to only display 256 colors.

I've tried Chicken of the VNC, and I get much faster response and overall feel when I use an X11 vncviewer instead. If you use Fink, you can fink install tightvnc (or fink install vnc4). After that, with X11 running, you can type 'vncviewer' to fire off the viewer app.
Added hint: you can see the menu in vncviewer at any time by hitting F8.
Also, there are ways to have a really fullscreen vncviewer, with no dock or Mac menu bar, but it involves setting an X11 preference and specifying fullscreen to vncviewer, and it's kind of flaky. Maybe someone else will post a hint for making this work well.

1. I've been using Chicken of the VNC to control our OSX Server 10.4.8 for over a year now with no problem. I had to restart the server yesterday and since then I've been unable to login using VNC. Everytime I try I get 'VNC Authentication Failed'.
2. Chicken is a VNC viewer, which means that it allows you to use a computer over a network as if you're sitting in front of it. Chicken is based on Chicken of the VNC, but contains a number of bug fixes and some additional features. As with Chicken of the VNC, Chicken features a full-screen mode, saving passwords in Keychain, mouse-button.

3 years later, this tip is still true. I used Mac Ports to install tightvnc instead of Fink, but I can verify that the speed improvement is dramatic.

If you're running Windows XP, you can use Microsoft's Remote Desktop Connection client for Mac together the 'Allow users to connect remotely to this computer' option in the Remote tab of System Properties in XP. That'll be a whole lot faster.

Isn't that only good for connecting to a XP machine from the Mac? It doesn't work the other way around, does it?
Also, RDC will require a XP Pro machine, as Home doesn't suport RDC connections.

Yup, Microsoft's Remote Desktop runs on XP Pro, 2003 Server, and 2000 Advanced Server. Since I doubt anyone here is running 2003 or Advanced Server, for our purposes, XP Pro.
If you're looking to connect to a XP Pro PC from your Mac, though, without question, Remote Desktop is the way to go. In general, I'm not a fan of Microsoft products, but they did a damn good job on Remote Desktop. It's fast, you can share printers and drives, and you can turn off stuff like desktop patterns automatically. On a fast connection, for basic stuff, it's almost as good as sitting at the computer.

Oops, you're right. I misread the hint. (I had an early, long morning.) Anywho, RDC is a really good way to connect to your Win XP box from your Mac. ;)

Apple Remote Desktop can act as a VNC server as well. Just check the box and assign a password for login. Available in your System Preferences Sharing pane.

interesting, I can't seem to connect from a windows client, I get a grey screen for a brief second, that dissapears, No error messages.
Oh well, it would've been cool :)

I tried out the Apple Remote Desktop VNC server, and found that it was much slower (screen updates) than OSXVNC is, so I switched back. I prefer to use built-in solutions over third party, but in this case it did *not* work as well...

Chicken Of The Vnc Mac Catalina

This is a pretty lengthy comment, and while there's enough new content to justify its own hint, I don't want to create a totally separate hint on this topic. Perhaps the site maintainer might considering merging this with the original post?
Here are some other ways to speed up the connection (i.e. decrease the latency of the screen response):
1. Change the encoding options. I find that 'Tight' works well over constrained bandwidths, but if the VNC server is on your LAN, that 'Raw' encoding may work better. There are other encodings, such as 'Hextile', 'CoRRE', 'ZlibHex', 'Zlib' and 'RRE' which may be more appropriate depending on your setup.
2. If your client offers allowing JPEG compression, try turning this on. This is CPU-intensive on the server, so if the quality level is adjustable, try experimenting with it to see if you're comfortable with the trade-offs between screen refresh latency and display quality.
3. Disable scaling, unless you need it. I find this is most useful for viewing a desktop machine from a handheld device, which has constrained display area.
4. Experiment with other supplied options like enabling CopyRect encoding and adjusting other custom compression levels.
Experimentation is key to optimizing your VNC connection. But if all of these options don't provide you with the experience you're looking for, consider contacting your ISP and upgrading your bandwidth (which generally costs more $$$).

Since somebody mentioned Microsoft's Remote Desktop, let me throw in for Timbuktu as an alternative solution. If you have the money to spend on a commerical product, I would recommend looking into Timbuktu, by Netopia. It is not free, but it is much faster then VNC and has a lot more remote control and security features and it may be worth looking in to if you need to use remote control frequently.
Or to look at it another way, VNC is to Timbuktu what vi is to BBEdit -- both do the same thing, but they are still a bit different in how they go about it :-)

How To Use Chicken Of The Vnc

One more thing that folks haven't mentioned... use TightVNC and the DFMirage hook display driver for the VNC Server component. Even without disabling backgrounds or reducing display depth, the DFMirage hook speeds things up noticeably (RDC connections are still faster, but screen resolutions over 640x480 are actually tolerable.)

For those of you who use VNC over a tunnel via SSH (other hints on this site cover this), enable compression in SSH ( -C ) and you'll find an increase in speed in VNC. That is, of course, if the extra processing power required to compress doesn't cause a slowdown-- users of older, slower, machines beware.

Tiger has a built in VNC server. Go to System Preferences, Sharing. Enable 'Apple Remote Desktop', then under Access Privileges, check 'VNC Viewers may control screen with password'

I use Teamviewer ( www.teamviewer.com ), this has features to omit the desktop image, and to select the pixels. Speed wise its not too bad, Great thing is that it works on Windows, Mac and Linux, and you can also just login from the web. You can setup user names so that you don't have to remember IP addresses. Special feature that I like, is that it has an app for my iPhone, so I can also control my PC & Mac from it. Also the software is FREE for non-commercial users.

Apple's built-in VNC server doesn't support anything but 'Millions' (24-bit) color modes. If you attempt to connect using a VNC client set to 'Thousands' (16-bit) or 256-color (8-bit) modes, it will fail.