TextureMind Desktop

TMD version 0.5.4 is available in the download page. This version adds an important missing piece: mouse pointer. Now TMD can handle the cursor when you move it over objects on the desktop screen. It can handle monochrome cursors with XOR masks, RGBA cursors and animations. This new version contains an important bug fix for random hangs on virtual machines and support for desktop scaling on Windows and fractional scaling on Linux. It’s more stable for backward and forward compatibility, unless major changes are applied (because the software is still in beta version).

I spent the last 2 days fixing a random hang in TMD on virtual machines, very complicated to reproduce. Now the software is super stable. It didn’t hang anymore after hours of uninterrupted video and audio streaming on a virtual machine with CentOS 7 on VMware and Windows Server 2022 on t2.micro.

From now, TMD will be able to show the mouse cursor of the host machine on the viewer window, when you move it over objects on the desktop screen. It can handle monochrome cursors with XOR masks, RGBA cursors and animations. The mouse cursor in TMD implements a simplified version of the video streaming in display channel, with QOI image format and LZ4 compression. It has its own frames-in-transit and it can handle 60 fps animations.

TMD version 0.5.3 is available in the download page. This version introduces a new audio codec with opus libraries, available on both Windows and Linux. The new codec uses about 1/5 of CPU and reduces the bandwidth used for the encoding. Other improvements are about stability, bug fixes in the GUI and skip encoding if the audio is mute. This version makes TMD more usable on low-end virtual machines like EC2 t2.micro.

I improved stability fixing a random hang that I saw for the first time on a slow virtual machine, but it could happen everywhere. The stability improvement is in TMD v0.5.1, so I removed the old version 0.5.0.

I took the decision to skip all the beta versions that I had in the roadmap and just push forward for releasing the first final version of TMD, which will be 2025.0. In many years of experience, I’ve seen many commercial products like TMD with way less functionalities and more bugs, and they were released to a wide audience of customers without hesitation. Once the authentication part is completed, I think TMD has all the features to be released and become a complete product in short time, even without all the optimizations that I had in mind. Just having the possibility of using such a tool for free is remarkable, if you consider that many of them are commercial, they have more bugs, they are heavier to download, configure and install. TMD is the first product where you can download a zip package for Linux, decompress and run it on CentOS7, OpenSUSE 15 or Ubuntu24, without installing anything else. On Windows, you don’t need the VS redistributable as well, it can start on Windows 8 or Windows 11 without problems. TMD never crashes or leaks memory at random. I kept the tmdserver process running in background for about 1 month and it never crashed or leaked memory. If you consider that my tmdserver is the equivalent of the agent in the other services of the same type and that some of these software may have several crashes of the agent per day, not having a single crash for 1 month is unbelievable. TMD will be a great alternative to all the chaotic, super heavy, inflated software of the same type, because it has been created by a wise person with a precise idea about everything, without copying & pasting or relying to other people, without leadership games, lazyness or using shortcuts of any kind.

TMD will have a great future.

I uploaded a bug fix for TMD Server v0.5 on Linux. It was an issue with screen capture in some resolution that caused black screen with lossless compression. I also improved the algorithm for the audio capture detection.

Now TMD v0.5 for Linux is available in the download page. Contrary to what was announced in the previous post, this release supports virtually all Linux distros as long as you have glibc version 2.17 or higher. There are two very positive aspects: 1) It is not necessary to specify a build for each Linux distro, greatly speeding up development times; 2) the user doesn’t have to navigate through the chaos of all the downloads looking for the most appropriate one for the Linux distro in use. Both the viewer and the server should start right away on any Desktop Linux distro (KDE or GNOME) without having to install anything else. So far it has been tested on both virtual and physical machines, on CentOS 7, CentOS 8, Ubuntu 20, Ubuntu 24, OpenSUSE 15 (more distros will be added soon). FFmpeg is still not supported, so the bandwidth usage may be higher than Windows (viewer) vs Windows (server). Please note: for tmdserver, you need to configure your firewall to allow port 4815, in this way:

$ sudo firewall-cmd --add-port=4815/tcp --permanent
$ sudo firewall-cmd --reload

Only after that, you can start tmdserver process and connect into that from another machine. If it doesn’t work, try before with another application on the same port, like iperf3, or contact your system administrator.

Currently I’m working to increase Linux support building with these distros: Centos 7, Centos 8, Rocky 9, Ubuntu 20 and Ubuntu 22 in addition to the already existing Ubuntu 24. After that, TMD version 0.5 for Linux will be available for the download.

TMD version 0.5 is available in the download page. This version introduces two important features: FFmpeg with video streams and audio channel. For now, FFmpeg makes use of mpeg-1 (enabled by default) encoder with a fallback to via-software vp9 and av1. Mpeg-1 proved to be fast enough to handle 60 fps on my environment with performance comparable to turbo-jpeg and way less bandwidth, while the other encoders were much slower. In the future, hardware av1 will be encoded instead of mpeg-1, where available. The audio channel is encoded with ogg-vorbis, with decent quality and performance. In the future, I will introduce also opus encoder, with better performance for real-time streaming, and FLAC for loss-less audio encoding. There are also other minor changes and bug fixes, the most important is the fix for a memory leak with multiple clients connected.