“Blind” / “Headless” input to a VNC session

Question

Is it possible to configure VNC such that:

• mouse & keyboard input is delivered from client to server
• no display capture is performed, and no display data is sent from server to client

?

The host machine is running OS X. The client machine is running Windows 7.

Background:

Without going into too much detail, I just need a blank "surface"/window on the client to capture and transmit input. The output from the server I view on a monitor directly connected at the same desk. I have noticed that CPU usage often spikes on the host machine and input latency suffers. I want to reduce input latency (reduce host CPU % spikes) by making the VNC session "write" but not "read", in some sense.

Answer 1

I was able to get this working by installing Vine Server VNC instead of using the VNC server built into OS X. In the Vine Server GUI I specified the following command line arguments

-noupdates -deferupdate 200

When I connect with my VNC client (UltraVNC), I now essentially get a giant blank window as my input surface, and in OS X I see less than 1% CPU utilization from Vine Server. Success!

Answer 2

Try win2vnc. I think this does what you're describing.