Embodiments of the present invention are directed to a remote desktop communication protocol that includes spatial and temporal compression techniques. Multimedia presentation data is generated at a server from a source. A compression facility modifies the presentation data by both spatially and temporally compressing the presentation data to transmittable data. In some embodiments, a check is performed to ensure that the least amount of data is selected prior to sending the transmittable data to a remote client. The remote client receives the transmittable data and re-constructs the original multimedia presentation data. In some embodiments that use lossy compression, the reconstruction may not exactly re-construct the original multimedia presentation data. Once re-created, the remote client presents the presentation data at the remote client. The presentation data could be audio, video, or other data or a combination of them.