Longview streams a real GPU workstation to the machine in front of you — colour-accurate, low-latency, and encrypted the whole way. Not a virtual desktop that approximates one. The actual machine, with its actual GPU.
General-purpose remote desktop tools subsample colour, re-encode on the CPU and treat audio and the clipboard as extras. That is survivable for a terminal and miserable for a timeline, a shader, a CAD assembly or anything where a pixel is the deliverable. Longview is built the other way round: the GPU that renders the desktop also captures and encodes it, and what reaches you is what the workstation actually drew — whichever operating system it happens to run.
HEVC 4:4:4, not the 4:2:0 nearly everything else sends. Chroma subsampling is invisible on photographs and brutal on small text and thin coloured lines — exactly what a workstation is covered in. And what stops moving keeps sharpening until it matches the workstation bit for bit, in HDR too.
HEVC 4:4:4 · pixel-exact when still · HDR10 · negotiated per sessionFrames are captured and encoded on the card that drew them, and never make a round trip through system memory to get there. The CPU stays free for the application you are actually running.
GPU capture · hardware encode · zero-copyEvery packet is authenticated encryption under a key the client and the workstation negotiate directly. The broker and gateway in between move ciphertext they cannot read.
Noise NX · ChaCha20-Poly1305 · header protectionPeople sign in with the account they already have, checked by the account system you already run — so your directory, your password policy, your existing second factor. Entitlement is by user and by group, not by machine.
directory accounts · groups · per-user and per-groupAudio, clipboard text, a mouse that games can take over, and on a headless workstation a screen that resizes to your window instead of letterboxing into it. A second person can watch, once the owner says yes on the desktop itself, without being able to touch anything.
Opus audio · clipboard sync · view-only guests · dynamic resolutionA wifi roam or a lid close does not end the session. The client says plainly when the picture has stopped being live, counts the seconds, and picks the stream back up when the packets return.
30s tolerance · explicit on-screen stateClients never reach a workstation directly. They present themselves to a Connection Manager, which authenticates the person, works out which machines they are entitled to, and hands back a one-session ticket to a gateway port. Workstations need no inbound firewall rule and no public address.
Credentials are checked against a real account database, not a list this software keeps of its own. The client pins the manager's certificate the first time it sees it and refuses a changed one after that.
Entitlement is written per user and per group, so a new starter in the right group gets the right workstations without anybody editing a machine list.
The manager tells the client which gateway port to use and what certificate it will present. Anything else is refused with a warning rather than quietly allowed.
Video, audio, input and clipboard run directly between client and workstation under keys neither the broker nor the gateway holds.
The gateway exists to be reachable, not to be trusted. It forwards bytes between two peers that authenticated each other, and it cannot decrypt a single frame of what it carries.
Setup runs over TLS 1.3. The session that follows is a Noise handshake between client and workstation, with every packet authenticated under the resulting keys — including the channel and sequence numbers in each header, which are masked rather than sent in the clear.
The client pins what it connects to by certificate, and the Connection Manager tells it in advance which certificate the gateway will present. A mismatch stops the connection and says so loudly instead of continuing.
A sliding replay window drops duplicated packets while tolerating the reordering a real network produces. A modified packet fails authentication and is discarded rather than decoded.
The broker authenticates people and hands out entitlements. It holds no workstation secrets and keeps no list of machine identities to be stolen — a workstation rebuilt overnight needs nothing re-enrolled.
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Workstations | Linux, macOS 14+ (Apple silicon) or Windows 10/11 (x86-64), with a GPU that has a hardware video encoder — see GPU support below. |
| Capture and encode | Whatever the platform's own is: NvFBC and NVENC on Linux, ScreenCaptureKit and VideoToolbox on macOS, Desktop Duplication and NVENC on Windows. |
| GPU support | NVIDIA today, plus Apple silicon's own media engine on macOS. AMD and Intel are on the roadmap, not in this release. |
| Clients | macOS 14+ (Apple silicon), Windows 10/11 (x86-64) or Linux, each with an NVIDIA GPU for decode except the Mac. HDR where the client's display shows it. |
| Connection Manager | A small x86-64 Linux server. No GPU. One inbound TCP port for setup plus a short gateway port range. |
| Video | HEVC, 4:4:4 or 4:2:0 by negotiation, BT.709 — and a progressive tier that sends what moves lossy and refines what stops to pixel-exact. HDR as 10-bit BT.2020 PQ from Windows and macOS workstations to clients that can show it, converted to SDR otherwise. A headless Linux workstation's virtual display resizes to the client window; a physical monitor keeps its own resolution and the client scales it to fit. |
| Input | Keys by physical position, so any keyboard layout works; mouse and high-resolution scrolling. A game on a Windows workstation that takes the mouse gets relative movement, from the macOS and Windows clients. |
| Audio | Opus, 48 kHz stereo, captured from the workstation's own output. |
| Transport | UDP media with forward error correction, TCP for setup. One port per live session on the gateway. |
| Cryptography | TLS 1.3 for setup. Noise_NX_25519_ChaChaPoly_BLAKE2s for the session, with per-packet AEAD and masked headers. |
| Authentication | Through the Connection Manager, its own PAM stack, so whatever directory that fronts. Directly to a workstation, the workstation's own accounts: PAM on Linux, Open Directory on macOS, Windows accounts (Microsoft accounts included) on Windows. Entitlement by user and by group. |
| Concurrency | One person owns a workstation at a time; others can watch read-only once the owner approves them on the desktop. The owner reconnecting takes their session back. On a shared Linux workstation, a different person arriving with nobody connected ends the previous session and signs in to their own; on Windows and macOS only the signed-in user can take control. |
| Running | A systemd service on Linux. On Windows a service that starts the host in whoever is signed in; on macOS a LaunchAgent at login. |
Two binaries and a config file. Nothing to register, no agent fleet to roll out, and nothing to undo if you decide against it.
Working out whether it fits a fleet rather than a workstation? sales@longview.network.