@warangel:

1. I recommend looking at this site:

http://www.portforward.com/routers.htm

It gives good instructions for about every existing router model. On the site you can pick a game to set up, just take any random one and in your mind replace the "port number" mentioned there with 5002. This is the standard port rendercow uses on startup.

2. As there are no known exploits for rendercow you can not get hacked through it. Due to the simple nature of the rendercow communication chances that flaws appear in future versions tend to zero. E-on would really need to be terribly drunk to make a future rendercow insecure.

Yeah Ranch computing has awesome performance, and while being "affordable" in terms of professional services it is for sure no solution a hobbyist user would ever use. Really! I had once played with the idea of using the ranch for a 1 minute animation of a very complicated scene with a huge ecosystem and on my system here at home it would have taken ~ 120 days to render the animation. After tweaking lighting/atmosphere/resolution i got it down to about 20 days which was still too much for an impatient guy like me. I used the ranch price calculator and while the animation would have rendered in less then 6 hours at the ranch it would have costed like 1200 USD. And 1200 US Dollar for 60 seconds of animation is not what the usual home user can afford. Just for the records: in the original settings that would have taken my computer 120 days it would have costed a whooping 7900 USD.

Yes - maybe some home users can afford to render a single frame still image for a few bucks there, but OpenVue is for hobbyists like me that want to render 1 minute animations a bit faster then 20 days.  :-)

Don't get this as a try to defame ranch Computing, their prices and performance are much better then anything else and for a professional service they are probably super cheap and stuff, but for private users like me and many others here that had to save up the bucks for Vue itself, it is out of question to spend 100 Dollars here and there for faster rendering.

I don't think OpenVue will be appealing for professionals or that it could be acompetition for ranch Computing. This is neither the focus of the project nor very likely.

Vue content creator
www.renderarmy.com