Embodiments include implementing a remote display system (either wired or wireless) using a standard, non-custom codec. In this system, the decoder side can be fully implemented using an existing standard from a decode/display point of view and using a single stream type. The encoder side includes a pre-processing component that analyzes screen images comprising the video data to determine an amount of difference between consecutive frames of the screen images, divides each screen image into a plurality of regions, including no change regions, high quality regions, and low quality regions. The pre-processor characterizes each region as requiring a minimum quality level, encodes the low quality regions for compression in accordance with the H.264 encoding standard; and encodes the high quality regions using the lossless compression scheme of the H.264 standard. A no change region is encoded using a version of the H.264 encoding standard that adaptively and dynamically selects between lossless and lossy compression in a manner that optimizes efficiency of the compression operation.