Introduction to TightVNC

Improve TightVNC: Make a Donation!

What Is TightVNC?

VNC (an abbreviation for Virtual Network Computing) is a great client/server software package allowing remote network access to graphical desktops. With VNC, you can access your machine from everywhere provided that your machine is connected to the Internet. VNC is free (released under the GNU General Public License) and it's available on most platforms.

Here you can find an enhanced version of VNC, called TightVNC, which includes a lot of new features, improvements, optimizations and bugfixes over the original VNC version, see the list of features below. Note that TightVNC is still free, cross-platform and compatible with the standard VNC. Many users agree that TightVNC is the most advanced free remote desktop package. And it's being actively developed so you can expect that TightVNC will become even better.

TightVNC can be used to perform remote control and administration tasks in Windows, Unix and mixed network environments. It can be very helpful in distance learning and remote customer support. Finally, you can find a number of additional VNC-compatible utilities and packages that can extend the areas where TightVNC can be helpful. See the Related Software page for information on useful third-party software.

TightVNC is a project maintained by Constantin Kaplinsky. Many other individuals and companies participate in development, testing and support.

How TightVNC Differs from Other VNC Products?

In short (more information is likely to appear here soon):

• We are trying to gather all the useful features, while keeping TightVNC free, stable and protocol-compatible with other RFB-compliant VNC software.

Compatibility and Interoperability

TightVNC is fully compatible with the standard RFB protocol used in VNC, so you can use TightVNC viewer with the standard VNC server and vice versa. But note that protocol enhancements implemented in TightVNC will work only if these enhancements are supported on both sides of the connection.

TightVNC Features

Here is a brief list of TightVNC features absent in the standard VNC.

• File transfers in versions for Windows. You can updload files from your local machine to the TightVNC Server, and download files from the server to your computer.
• Support for video mirror driver (Windows 2000 and above). TightVNC Server can use DFMirage mirror driver to detect screen updates and grab pixel data in a very efficient way, saving processor cycles for other applications.
• Scaling of the remote desktop (viewer for Windows and Java viewer). You can view the remote desktop in whole on a screen of smaller size, or you can zoom in the picture to see the remote screen in more details.
• Efficient "Tight" encoding with optional JPEG compression. New Tight encoding is optimized for slow and medium-speed connections and thus generates much less traffic as compared to traditional VNC encodings. Unlike other encodings, Tight encoding is configurable via compression levels and JPEG image quality setting.
• Enhanced Web browser access. TightVNC includes a greatly improved Java viewer with full support for Tight encoding, 24-bit color mode, and more. The Java viewer applet can be accessed via built-in HTTP server like in the standard VNC.
• Support for two passwords, full-control and read-only. The server allows or disallows remote keyboard and mouse events depending on which password was used for authentication.
• Automatic SSH tunneling on Unix. The Unix version of TightVNC Viewer can tunnel connections via SSH automatically using local SSH/OpenSSH client installation.
• And more. TightVNC includes a number of other improvements, performance optimizations and bugfixes, see change logs for more information.