What's New in TinyPilot's May 2022 Update

The May release of TinyPilot adds experimental support for H.264, a faster and more performant format for video streaming.

H.264 video over WebRTC

TinyPilot has always used the MJPEG format to stream the display from your target computer back to your browser. MJPEG is a simple format, but it consumes a large amount of bandwidth.

Our May releases of TinyPilot Pro and TinyPilot Community offer experimental support for H.264, a newer, high-performance video format with several benefits over MJPEG.

H.264 has lower latency, so you'll notice that your mouse movements will feel snappier as you control your remote computer through TinyPilot.

H.264 also uses network bandwidth more efficiently, so picture quality will be higher while placing less load on the network. You'll especially benefit from H.264 if you access your TinyPilot over the Internet.

The demo below shows TinyPilot using the default MJPEG format and then switching to H.264 compression. The bandwidth drops from 21 Mbps to less than 5 Mbps without any loss in video quality:

Enabling H.264 video

We're still polishing the H.264 feature, so it's not yet available through the web UI. If you'd like to try it out, you can enable it on your device through the command-line.

Update (2023-02-09): As of TinyPilot Pro 2.5.2 and TinyPilot Community 1.8.1, you can enable H.264 video from the standard TinyPilot web interface.