Within one of our large projects the developers faced with the following situation: user on a remote computer works with media files located on a terminal server (this is ensured by Windows Terminal Services, which are based on the RDP protocol). However, such work causes 2 problems: the quality of playing video and sound files on the remote machine deteriorates greatly, and huge increase of traffic between client and server takes place.

In order to allow a user to play media files from the server without any quality loss, we?ve developed the following solution: compressed media data are taken from the server with custom DirectX media filter and streamed to the client machine via the virtual channel mechanism provided by the RDP protocol.

Deep knowledge of DirectX and the potentials of virtual channels were applied for solving this problem. As a result, the users of our product are able to open and play multimedia on a remote machine in its original quality. Moreover, as long as compressed media data are being sent from a server to client, the solution doesn?t lead to high bandwidth consumption.