Dell ThinOS 2402 and 2405 Administrator’s Guide

Switch between codecs in Blast sessions

VMware Blast sessions support the use of industry-standard codecs such as H.264, HEVC for remoting screen content from Horizon Agent to Horizon Client.

• Prerequisite—Horizon Agent 2203 or later must be installed to support High Definition Color for H.264 or HEVC.
• The Horizon administrator can use agent-side group policy settings to activate or deactivate the VMware Blast features, including High Definition Color for H.264 and HEVC.
• Horizon Agent uses a hardware codec when your system environment meets the following criteria:
  • The agent machine supports the hardware codec.
  • For HEVC and AV1, the client machine must have a GPU that supports the hardware codec.
• VMware Blast options on the client are configured to allow use of the decoding method.
• Currently, thin clients do not support AV1 and HEVC 4:4:4 configurations.
• Horizon Agent chooses a hardware codec according to the following order of preference:
  • HEVC 4:4:4 (high-definition color)
  • H.264 4:4:4 (high-definition color)
  • HEVC 4:2:0 (standard-definition color)
  • H.264 4:2:0 (standard-definition color)
• If hardware codecs are not supported on both the client and agent machines, Horizon Agent chooses a software codec according to the following order of preference and decoding methods that are allowed on the client:
  • BlastCodec (high-definition color)
  • H.264 4:4:4 (high-definition color)
  • H.264 4:2:0 (standard-definition color)
  • Adaptive (high-definition color)