KRDP stops updating image whenever client window is minimized

Skylark13 · July 21, 2026, 7:53am

Hello, this is about KRDP.

After doing the workaround noted in this topic: https://discuss.kde.org/t/krdp-stopped-working-6-7-0/47955/14?u=skylark13

I am in the same situation as the last comment in that thread. In my case, after connecting it works great, but if I minimize the RDP window and then come back to it a bit later, the image no longer updates (but I still see the mouse moving on the “remote” system’s monitor).

My ~/.config/systemd/user/app-org.kde.krdpserver.service.d/override.conf has these contents, but the last 3 lines were just trying other things to see if I could solve this issue, but it occurs whether I have those or not.

[Service]
NoNewPrivileges=false
Environment=KPIPEWIRE_FORCE_ENCODER=libx264
Environment=LIBVA_DRIVERS_PATH=/nonexistent
Environment=LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=dummy

Here’s what I see in journalctl between the moment I minimize the client window and the moment I close it to reconnect:

Jul 20 23:53:54 excalibur krdpserver[1319012]: [libx264 @ 0x7f2b81520e00] frame I:1     Avg QP: 0.00  size:1392157
Jul 20 23:53:54 excalibur krdpserver[1319012]: [libx264 @ 0x7f2b81520e00] frame P:52    Avg QP: 2.31  size: 85158
Jul 20 23:53:54 excalibur krdpserver[1319012]: [libx264 @ 0x7f2b81520e00] mb I  I16..4: 100.0%  0.0%  0.0%
Jul 20 23:53:54 excalibur krdpserver[1319012]: [libx264 @ 0x7f2b81520e00] mb P  I16..4:  1.9%  0.0%  0.0%  P16..4: 16.1%  0.0%  0.0%  0.0%  0.0%    skip:81.9%
Jul 20 23:53:54 excalibur krdpserver[1319012]: [libx264 @ 0x7f2b81520e00] coded y,uvDC,uvAC intra: 57.8% 47.6% 47.5% inter: 7.9% 7.1% 7.0%
Jul 20 23:53:54 excalibur krdpserver[1319012]: [libx264 @ 0x7f2b81520e00] i16 v,h,dc,p: 49% 40%  9%  2%
Jul 20 23:53:54 excalibur krdpserver[1319012]: [libx264 @ 0x7f2b81520e00] i8c dc,h,v,p: 57% 30% 11%  2%
Jul 20 23:53:54 excalibur krdpserver[1319012]: [libx264 @ 0x7f2b81520e00] kb/s:878548.31
Jul 20 23:55:54 excalibur krdpserver[1319012]: Cannot start recording on a stream without a node ID

I wonder if there’s something that can be found out and fixed from this, or if I can assist in finding the cause of this problem since I have such an easy repro. In case it makes a difference, the client RDP viewer is the one from Windows 11 (mstsc), and the host system is running CachyOS with KDE Plasma 6.7.3 and KRDP 6.7.3-1.1 from cachyos-extra-v3.

It’s really unfortunate because all other solutions I’ve found work even worse (rustdesk is the closest to usable, but it’s slow and sometimes has unacceptable artifacts even on a local network). KRDP would work great except I have to reconnect every time I switch to some other window on the client system.

I hope something can be done to improve this.

Skylark13 · July 21, 2026, 9:26pm

Also, I just noticed: I was testing with mstsc connecting to the CachyOS Linux host, but using either Remmina or KRDC from another CachyOS Linux machine as client gives a completely black or white screen, but I can see the mouse cursor change as it goes over different windows. The output (when running KRDC from the terminal) contains these errors repeatedly:

[17:10:46:041] [2719019:00298ea4] [ERROR][com.freerdp.codec] - [libavcodec_decompress]: Failed to transfer video frame (status=-38) (Function not implemented)
[17:10:46:041] [2719019:00298ea4] [WARN][com.freerdp.codec] - [log_decompress]: H264 decompress failed with -1
[17:10:46:041] [2719019:00298ea4] [WARN][com.freerdp.gdi] - [gdi_SurfaceCommand_AVC420]: avc420_decompress failure: -1, ignoring update.

So I think this is the issue reported here in FreeRDP: (issue 13069, looks like I cannot yet post links) , which has been fixed but has not yet made its way to a released version of either KRDC or Remmina.

Skylark13 · July 22, 2026, 2:13am

About the black or white screen issue in KRDP and Remmina, uninstalling the libva-nvidia-driver package resolves it. So it’s indeed not related to KRDP (the host side) at all.

Skylark13 · July 22, 2026, 2:24am

Replying to myself again because I cannot edit the posts above:

I found the related issue on the nvidia-vaapi-driver github: elFarto/nvidia-vaapi-driver issue 434

Skylark13 · July 25, 2026, 3:01pm

For anyone watching this thread:

The bug that RDP stops sending the image when you minimize the RDP window from a Windows client seems to be resolved and scheduled to be released with KDE Plasma 6.8 (planned for October). See the bug report and merge request. I am going to be setting up a build environment and testing to confirm the fix.

I also found a few work items related to dynamic resolution (currently when connecting to a KRDP server, it will stream the host monitor’s resolution, rather than allowing the client to specify the resolution it wants like a Windows RDP host or other RDP implementations on Linux do). This is an important QOL feature IMHO, but admittedly less critical than the one above.