RDP Download | Remote Desktop Protocol Download (RDP) is a secure network communications protocol which provides remote display and input capabilities over network connections for Windows-based applications running on a server. RDP is a proprietary protocol developed by Microsoft, and it provides a user with a graphical interface such that to connect to another computer over a network connection. The user employs RDP client software for this purpose, while the other computer must run on the RDP server software. RDP is designed to support multiple LAN protocols and different types of network topologies. Remote Desktop Protocol is a multiple-channel capable protocol that allows for separate virtual channels for carrying device communication and presentation data from the server, as well as encrypted client mouse and keyboard data.
With this feature, users can redirect locally connected, serial (COM) ports, such as built-in RS232 ports or USB to Serial adapters, to their remote desktops. To support serial port redirection, your View deployment must meet certain software and hardware requirements.
Remote Desktop Protocol Architecture
RDP is based on, and an addition of the ITU T.120 family of protocols. The Remote Desktop Protocol is an extension of the ITU-T T.128 application sharing protocol. Being a multiple-channel capable protocol RDP allows separate virtual channels to carry device communication and presentation data from the server, along with the encrypted client mouse and keyboard data. RDP provides an extensible base and supports up to 64,000 separate channels for the transmission of data and provisions for multipoint transmission.
On the server, RDP Viewer uses its video driver to provide display output by constructing the rendering information into network packets by using Remote Desktop Protocol client and sending them to the client over the network. It is the same technique as that of the Radmin (Remote Administrator) to control another computer remotely. On the client, RDP receives furnishing data and interprets the packets into corresponding Microsoft Windows graphics device interface (GDI) API calls. For the input path, client mouse and keyboard events are redirected from the client to the server. On the server, RDP uses its keyboard and mouse driver to receive these keyboard and mouse events.
In a Remote Desktop session, all the environment variables such as variables determining the colour depth and wallpaper enabling and disabling are also determined by the RCP-TCP connection settings. It is applied to all the functions and methods that set environment variables in the Remote Desktop Services WMI Provider Interface and Remote Desktop Web Connection Reference. Use the Angry IP Scanner for searching the network users and port scans.
Download Remote Desktop Protocol For Windows:
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Download Remote Desktop Protocol For Mac:
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Features of Remote Desktop Protocol
Encryption – RDP uses RSA Security’s RC4 cipher, a stream cipher designed to encrypt small amounts of data efficiently. RC4 is designed for secure communications over networks. Administrators could choose to encrypt data by using a 56- or 128-bit key.
Bandwidth Eduction Features – RDP supports various mechanisms to reduce the amount of data transmitted over a network connection. Mechanisms include data compression, persistent caching of bitmaps, and caching of glyphs and fragments in RAM.
Roaming Disconnect – A user can manually disconnect from a remote desktop session without logging off. The user is automatically reconnected to their disconnected session when the user logs back onto the system, either from the same device or a different device. When a user’s session is unexpectedly terminated by a network or client failure, the user is disconnected from the RDP Network but not logged off.
Clipboard Mapping – Users can delete, copy, and paste text and graphics between applications running on the local computer and those running in a remote desktop session, and between sessions.
Print Redirection – Applications running within a remote desktop session can print to a printer attached to the client device.
Virtual Channels – By using RDP virtual channel architecture, existing applications can be augmented, and new applications can be developed to add features that require communications between the client device and an application running in a remote desktop session.
Remote Control – Computer support staff can view and control a remote desktop session. Sharing input and display graphics between two remote desktop sessions gives a support person the ability to diagnose and resolve problems remotely. Use Advanced IP Scanner to scan for the IP addresses in any range as well as in any ports.
Network Load Balancing – RDP takes advantage of network load balancing (NLB), where available.
Also, RDP contains the following features:
RDP has the support for 32-bit colour. It also supports 8-, 15-, 16-, and 24-bit color.
RDP supports 128-bit encryption by using the RC4 encryption algorithm, as of Version 6.
Improved performance over low-speed dial-up connections takes place in RDP through reduced bandwidth.
RDP has Smart Card authentication through the Remote Desktop Services.
RDP supports Keyboard hooking, which is the ability to direct special Windows key combinations, in the full-screen mode, to a local computer or a remote computer.
Audio Redirection enables the users to process audio on a remote desktop and have the sound redirected to their local computer. The sounds that occur on the remote computer could be heard on the client computer running the RDC client, and the local client drives would be visible to the remote desktop session.
File System Redirection enables the users to use their local files on a remote desktop within the terminal session.
Printer Redirection enables the users to use their local printer within the terminal session since they would work with a locally or network-shared printer.
Port Redirection enables the applications running within the terminal session to access the local serial and parallel ports directly.
The remote computer and the local computer could share the clipboard.
You may also like Advanced Port Scanner For Windows and Mac PC
Working of Remote Desktop Protocol
The RDP protocol is designed to provide the remote access through port 3389. An RDP-enabled application or the service packages data that are to be transmitted and the Microsoft Communications Service directs the data to an RDP channel. From there, the operating system will encrypt the RDP data and adds it to a frame so that it could be transmitted. The Terminal Server Device Redirector Driver handles all the RDP protocol activity. The driver is made up of subcomponents such as the RDP driver (Wdtshare.sys), and that handles the user interfaces, transfers, encryption, compression, and framing. The transport driver (Tdtcp.sys) is responsible for packaging the protocol in such a way that allows it to be sent across the TCP/IP network. The Advanced Network Scanner performs ping sweep, scans for opened TCP and UDP ports, resource shares and services.
The setup of RDP software is easy to do. Users only need to open the main dialog box and enter the network ID of the computer on which they wanted to connect to, and the connection gets established almost instantly. The user could alternatively enter the name of the computer with which the connection needs to be made. The user must be sure that the Terminal Services is activated on both the machines or the connection prompt would be rejected. It is also possible to choose or configure personal preferences. It may include making the hard drives accessible to both the computers along with the selecting of the resolution of the machines.
RDP Software Supported Services:
Mouse and the user keyboard data encryption
Audio, printer, port and file redirection
Clipboard sharing among a remote server and a local client
Remote desktop applications run on the client machines using a remote desktop connection
Remote Desktop Services (RDS) that provides RDP functionality via Windows 2008 R2 with the Service Pack 1 (SP1)
Multiple features were added to the RDP version 6.0. These include Aero Glass remoting, multiple monitor support, Windows Media Player (WMP) redirection, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) applications and remoting. RDP can also be implemented on non-Microsoft platforms. For example, “rdesktop” is a command-line client used on Unix and Linux platforms. Advanced Port Scanner has a large number of descriptions for the most common ports, and it lets you scan on a predefined port range.
Other Softwares Related to RDP
We hope our post is very useful. If you have any queries regarding Remote Desktop Protocol, please comment below.
In April 2018, Thincast released the first public Beta of Thincast Workstation, a new workstation hypervisor based on Oracle’s VirtualBox.We use FreeRDP’s server implementation to replace VirtualBox’s VRDP extension which is only available with the Oracle VM VirtualBox Extension Pack.Together with our own powerful 3D graphics virtualization inside the guest we provide a smooth and rich user experience, no matter from where you are accessing your virtual machines.
But now let’s take a closer look at where and how FreeRDP comes into play in our product.
Our RDP server resides in a separate, platform independent library that we call “virtual server”. One of the tasks of this library is to serve as a bridge between VirtualBox’sremote desktop extension (VRDE) API and FreeRDP. It provides a full featured RDP server, including clipboard and sound redirection, user management as well as RemoteFX and H.264streaming. The great thing here is that thanks to FreeRDP, all the protocol related work has already been done for us. We don’t have to worry about connection management, packetparsing or data marshalling. Our library just hooks the various callbacks that the FreeRDP API provides (i.e. handling mouse/keyboard input) and passes them into VirtualBox’s VRDE.
On the other hand our virtual server library receives notifications from VirtualBox i.e. when the display buffer is updated. Using FreeRDP we can easily forward all theseupdates to one, or multiple RDP clients connected to our server. Because RDP is a standardized protocol, the users are able to use any RDP compatible client to connect to theirvirtual machines. On top of that, FreeRDP gives us access to the latest desktop streaming extensions of the RDP protocol like RemoteFX and H.264 remoting.
Thanks to WinPR it was an easy task for us to implement the virtual server library platform independent. Threading, synchronization or file access is all done using the Win32API. Platform specific code parts were reduced to just a handful of lines i.e. for user management. This allows us to have a single code base that we can reuse on multipleplatforms by just linking to WinPR on non-Windows systems.
With H.264 desktop streaming, introduced in RDP 10, we now also have new possibilities to transfer the desktop content to the user. We have developed a special load-balancingalgorithm that adjusts image quality during streaming, based on current network characteristics. FreeRDP’s network characteristics detection (which is part of the RDP corespecification) provides us with all the necessary information about the connection’s latency and bandwidth. Depending on these parameters we dynamically increase or decrease thequality level of the H.264 encoder. An implementation of the software H.264 encoder backend, using OpenH264, is also part of the FreeRDP library.
As explained earlier, Thincast Workstation provides virtual graphics hardware to the guest that exposes full Direct3D11 support. This means all graphical operations in the guestOS are handled and accelerated by the host GPU. As we want to achieve the best performance possible, it would be a pity to do the H.264 encoding of our virtual desktop insoftware. Luckily, thanks to FreeRDP’s modular architecture, we were able to plug-in our own hardware encoders and completely offload this work from the CPU. Because every vendorhas its own multimedia framework we implemented encoders for all major GPU producers including NVidia, AMD and Intel.
Screenshot: Remote session to a virtual machine running UL’s 3DMark benchmark.
Thincast Workstation comes with its own FreeRDP based client called Thincast Viewer. The Viewer is part of the Thincast Client package and offers some advantages over other RDPclients like Microsoft’s Windows client mstsc. The first advantage it offers is an improved performance mode for connections to local virtual machines. In this mode graphicalupdates are not streamed over RDP but directly fetched from the GPU. Thincast Viewer also provides various control options like starting, pausing or shutting down the virtualmachine. These features are implemented using a custom virtual channel that we added to our FreeRDP library. Remote connections to a virtual machine using H.264 desktop streamingwill be decoded on the client side using hardware support. All current GPUs offer hardware H.264 decoding support and especially mobile users will greatly benefit from thesignificantly lower CPU utilization. Again we simply replaced FreeRDP’s default software decoder with our own hardware implementation, without modifying anything in the libraryitself. And last but not least, Thincast Viewer is available on Windows, Linux and macOS.
What is coming to Thincast Workstation in the future? We are thinking about adding some kind of gateway service that serves as a central access point to all virtual machines.Currently each VM listens on its own port for incoming connections which makes management and administration a bit troublesome.
We also keep an eye out for further extensions or changes to the RDP protocol. For instance newer video codecs, i.e. H.265 or AOMedia Video 1 (a.k.a AV1), might become interesting fordesktop streaming in the future.
Apart from these RDP-related improvements we also want to improve the remaining parts of Thincast Workstation. Our current Beta for instance already contains virtual graphicshardware that offers support for Direct3D 12. The implementation is already close to completion but still has some known issues. We have also added Vulkan to our to-do list butwork on this topic is just in its beginnings.
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