Two Tenebra instances streaming macOS Ventura and Windows 11 viewed using Lux Desktop on Arch Linux.
Tenebra is a remote desktop server based on modern video streaming technology written in Rust. Connect to Tenebra with a compatible client to view and control another machine's screen.
| Platform | Compatibility |
|---|---|
| Linux/X11 | Excellent |
| Mac | Good[1] |
| Windows | Excellent |
| Linux/Wayland | None; pipewiresrc is too slow |
[1] Latency seems to be higher. Sound forwarding and pen/touch input are not implemented.
Tenebra uses GStreamer to record the screen in a cross-platform way, and to encode H.264 samples, so GStreamer's runtime utilities must be installed on your system for Tenebra to work. On Linux, GStreamer should be available using your package manager. On macOS and Windows, see the hyperlink below.
To use a Github release, you only need the runtime package. To build Tenebra, you need to install both the development and the runtime packages. On Windows, GStreamer's bin folder must be added to the PATH.
After the server is built with cargo build --release, you may run it. On macOS and Linux, this is as easy as:
./target/release/tenebra
But on Windows, Tenebra must run as a service in order to have the necessary integrity level to interact with all parts of the desktop. First, a service must be registered:
sc create Tenebra binPath= "C:\path\to\tenebra\exe"
Then, starting Tenebra is as easy as:
sc start Tenebra
However, Tenebra reads from a config file which must be populated before running Tenebra. If it is not populated, Tenebra will fail before copying the default config file to the config file directory.
- On Linux the config file is at
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/tenebra/config.toml or$HOME/.config/tenebra/config.toml (e.g. /home/alice/.config/tenebra/config.toml) - On Windows the config file is at C:\tenebra\config.toml
- On macOS the config file is at
$HOME/Library/Application Support (e.g. /Users/Alice/Library/Application Support)
Alternatively, use Tenebra GTK to configure Tenebra in a user-friendly way:
On Linux, VA-API can be used to perform hardware accelerated H.264 encoding. This can be enabled by setting the hwencode property in the config.toml to true. The va GStreamer plugin (NOT the vaapi plugin - this one is broken) must be installed and USABLE. If your system supports the vapostproc GStreamer element, you may enable the vapostproc option as well.
On macOS, VideoToolbox can be used to perform hardware accelerated H.264 encoding. This can be enabled by setting the hwencode property in the config.toml to true. The vtenc_h264 GStreamer element must be installed and USABLE.
On Windows, Media Foundation can be used to perform hardware accelerated H.264 encoding. This can be enabled by setting the hwencode property in the config.toml to true. The mfh264enc GStreamer element must be installed and USABLE. Enable hwencode will also automatically enable the use of D3D11 for video format conversion.
On Linux and Windows, Tenebra has support for receiving and emulating touch and pen events (e.g. from an iPad client).
On Linux, this requires permission to access uinput. Reference your distribution's documentation for details.