Simple VNC viewer that is built with Twisted-Python and PyGame. Originally written by Chris Liechti.

The viewer supports the following encodings: Hextile, CoRRE, RRE, RAW, CopyRect

The display is done using pygame because of it's good graphics performance, but any GUI system can be used as the code is modular and can be easily adapted. Two good examples of code reuse are VNC client in browser by Arkaitz Jimenez, and most recent vncdotool by Marc Sibson. Pygame version supports clipboard transfer, but it's not used in the sample application.

Usage

You can simply start vncviewer.py and it will ask for a hostname and password if required. Hostnames are in the "host:display" form, where "display" is the VNC dispaly number.

These settings can be passed through command line, but note it's a bad idea to pass the password in this way as it can be snooped by other users with a simple process listing! Try -h or --help to see supported options.

Please keep in mind that VNC transimts keypresses in cleartext, so don't type in passwords on non-encrypted connection over insecure networks.

With "--depth" a display depth can be gived, use "8" for slower connections.

The "--fast" option uses only RAW and CopyRect encodings and is thus only suitable for fast connections. But it delivers better performance than other encodings.

What is it good for?

Nothing ;-) Use the original VNC viewer for better performance.

However it works very well and I think with a good speed. It could be embedded in other Python applications or it can server as a base of various supervision or remote desktop applications, automated tests of GUIs or be embedded in a tool for remote support...

Bugs, etc

• Properties dialog is missing. Like for specifying encodings etc.
• Listen mode not implemented.
• Key repetition does not work (pygame?)
• It does not reduce update requests when minimized.
• Screen cannot be scolled, impractical if remote desktop is larger than local
• The password dialog blocks twisted and everthing else

References:

• http://homepage.hispeed.ch/py430/python/
• http://code.google.com/p/vnc2flv/
• http://arkaitzj.wordpress.com/2011/11/12/vnc-in-your-browser-through-websockets-handled-by-gevent/
• http://sibson.github.io/vncdotool/
• http://www.python.org
• http://twistedmatrix.com/
• http://www.pygame.org
• http://www.realvnc.org

---

• (c) 2003 chris cliechti@gmx.net
• (c) 2009 techtonik techtonik@gmail.com

Released under the MIT License.

You're free to use it for commercial and noncommercial application, modify and redistribute it as long as the copyright notices are intact. There are no warranties, not even that it does what it says to do ;-)

Changes:

2015.08.29 - expored to Github 2009.12.14 - 4. another update

• replaced crippled_des.py with pyDes
• TAB and BACKSPACE keys now work 2009.12.3 - 3. update
• changed license to MIT with Chris consent as Python license is not supported by Google Code
• works with twisted 8.2.0
• works with pygame 1.9.1 (blit failed on locked surfaces)
• don't refuse to connect to 3.7 and 3.8 VNC servers 2003.3.4 - 2. release
• improved performance with RRE, CoRRE
• color depth can be choosen (32, 8)
• added "fast" option 2003.3.3 - 1. public release