Every once in a while, I think of a potential project to work on and think, "Huh. That looks easy. If it were really that easy, someone would have written it by now." swfdec was one such projects. librfb (and a corresponding GStreamer plugin rfbsrc) is my latest. Eight hours later, I run 'gst-launch-0.7 rfbsrc ! ximagesink', and get a hack that is essentially equivalent to xvncviewer. Give or take a few features. RFB (remote framebuffer) is the name of the protocol that VNC uses.