Hands on the McTiVia PC-to-TV Streamer

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We continue to find ourselves in a transition period where the majority of our set-top boxes and televisions aren’t sufficiently empowered to deliver Internet content. While some of us have resorted to directly connecting a computer to the HDTV, a variety of solutions have sprung up to relay PC-based content onto the television. Intel’s Wireless Display (WiDi) and Veebeam are examples we’ve covered in recent months. However, as each of these manufacturers uniquely tackle this challenge, McTiVia is a new entrant worth discussing.

Basically, McTiVia ($199) allows you to broadcast your Mac or PC display and audio straight to your television. Unlike Veebeam, which includes a wireless USB dongle you attach to your computer that communicates to a small box co-located at a television, McTiVia is software powered. And 8 computers can be configured to beam their desktops to the TV (in a much more agnostic method than Intel’s CPU-locked down offering).

One of my primary complaints with these sorts of products has been the inability to remote control your computer content on the television. Both Intel and Veebeam expect you to sit on your couch with a laptop… on your laptop. So one of the things that makes McTiVia compelling is its USB port to facilitate the use of a wireless keyboard and mouse. Although, it’s not clear what sort of latency one can expect when using it.

McTiVia currently outputs video at 720p and stereo audio. Whereas the “HD” Veebeam variant ($149) hits 1080p and provides surround sound. Something to consider if HD video is on your docket. But, again, you’re limited to a 1:1 hardware relationship and the computer must be co-located with the television, possibly defeating the purpose. Why not just run cables from computer-to-TV at that point?

Unlike our typical hands review, the 11+ minute McTiVia video above was produced by ZNF reader Evan M. He’s been pleased with his purchase thus far and wanted to share his experiences with our community. Hit Evan in the comment section below with any questions and I’ve asked him to provide an update since recording his initial thoughts.

13 thoughts on “Hands on the McTiVia PC-to-TV Streamer”

  1. To remotely control your computer content instead of using your computer, I plugged in the back of my mctivia a USB nano dongle that works with the Lenovo Multimedia Remote with Keyboard and it worked quite well.

    If you do pick up a mctivia, the software CD that it comes with should be the latest version. If it’s not, there’s a “software update” process that can be found when you launch the software near the preference options. I highly recommend checking to see if there are any updates available. At the time of purchase in January, they’ve had 3 software updates. Each update made the product faster, support more resolutions, etc.

    I’ve reached out to their mctivia customer support for a couple questions and my most recent experience this week was met with great results! I observed a bug using the Multimedia Remote with Keyboard to control my mctivia as you can see here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYUMcYggpE8 and within an hour, their support team provided me with a firmware update for the mctivia product itself. This update is different from a software update I mentioned previously. The firmware update they provided was specifically for the hardware. There’s an admin section that can be accessed via the software, and among all the customization and network options, there’s an option to perform firmware updates. The support team plans to make future firmware updates more accessible for customers on their website soon they said.

    This weekend was my son’s 1st birthday and both my wife and I created projects separately our own mac computers. Instead of burning our projects to discs and then playing our presentations on a DVD player, which we would do traditionally do for example, we instead opted to put mctivia to the test and stream our presentations to the TV. It was an excellent idea, in my opinion, because our projects not technically 100% complete, since we started and finished just the night before, and simply streaming the projects to the TV would also save us hours of editing, burning and testing to make sure the videos played correctly. Here’s a short video I took streaming my wife’s project using mctivia for my family and friends to enjoy this weekend. Streaming the content was truly a flawless experience: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcUDaLCTAMc

  3. Evan,
    Thanks for taking the time and making the effort to inform us about this.

    I am considering ordering one.

    My 24 hour rule began about 30 minutes ago when I watched your video. (Rule is, “Wait 24 hours before ordering gadgets to see if I still want to spend the money.”)

  5. Evan,

    Thanks for taking the time to do this. I’m mostly interested in this for internet video really, so honestly the 720p limitation doesn’t seem like a big deal. Being able to do this without a dongle of any sort on the laptop however is a big deal.

    You talked about using Ethernet on the McTivia which seems like a good idea, but never mentioned what you were doing on the laptop. I ASSUME you were on WiFi thru the same router. Can’t imagine you were not but would like to make sure.

    Any info you have on bandwidth required would be helpful. Obviously the internet video itself is probably going to peak at 5 or 6Mbps at MOST (usually much less) but since the laptop is probably doing its own re-encoding…

    – are there any requirements wrt the CPU or GPU on the laptop to handle this load?
    – any hints what the bandwidth from the laptop out to the TV needs to be? I assume its going to be higher than what was originally streamed for example.
    – is that bandwidth adjustable to control the amount of artifacts I might see? have you ever seen any?

  6. I am waiting for the new FoxConn nT-535 to show up on Newegg. I think when looking close to $200 I would rather have a mini pc next to TV. I would get many more streaming options and I have been burned when a nitch hardware developer disappears.

  7. Glad you found my demo useful… I can only answer your questions based on a mac experience since I don’t have a personal PC. I do have a work pc, but it has XP at this time and Windows 7 or Vista is highly recommended over XP.

    – i agree. I find streaming 720p just fine for my taste and use mctivia for the same reason you suggested. i stream a lot of videos i’ve downloaded off the net and personal projects, so its a huge time saver to stream content rather than manage a separate computer to tether its content to a tv. I don’t have an optimal room for 5.1 surround sound, so I’m satisfied with all my speakers each playing stereo. to any audiophile, I’m sure it’s laughable what I just said, but my living room is just not meant for anything more than equal sound distributed to all my 5 speakers.

    – my setup had my mctivia hardwired to my router and my mac was communicating wirelessly to my router. i’ve personally never tried to have mctivia connected over wifi instead of hardwired. i’m in a lucky spot since my mctivia sits next to my tv and router. some people may not be so lucky and will op to test out the wifi setup.

    – while the Mirrorop application is running, which is the software that will come with your hardware, my LAN speed communicating to the mctivia is about 500kbps according to my istat widget. It’s highly recommended that you have an N router for optimal performance says the site, which I’m using as well. When I’m using my slingbox, for example, I’m pushing about 800kbps to 1mb or more. So, I’m going to have a much better picture using my slingbox than I do using my mctivia, but for obvious reasons since slingbox is meant for you to sit up close to your computer screen while using the mctivia you sit further away since its projecting to your television. I have a feeling mctivia is not streaming any more than 500kbps, at least from my tests, for good reason noted directly below:

    – I observed the mirroring application uses about 50% to 70% CPU on my mac. So your internal fans will kick on if you’re going to run this on a macbook pro for example. When I’m using my slingbox app on my mac, for example, the CPU usage runs between 30% and 40%. So, any streaming app will eat resources. It just depends on how much…

    – a dual core PC (excluding Atom processors) or Mac with NVidia or ATI graphic hardware is required to encode the screen images in 30 FPS (Frame Per Second) speed. There’s some custom modifications that can be done to your computer locally, but from a mac experience, I’m satisfied.

    – I sit about 20+ feet away from my HDTV and when you’re up front and personal with your television, you will observe some faint artifacts around edges of objects on the screen. I can promise you the rendered output of your content is not going to be the absolute sharpest picture, but it does a great job in my humble opinion and I chose the wireless mctivia setup over my previous tethered mac mini setup. That should say a lot right there…

    – I’m not aware of any kind of bandwidth allocation that you can modify really. It monitors itself and adjusts for you. Mctivia adopted a lossy compression therefor the projection may be of slightly lower caliber than what’s on your computer screen. You can change the quality depending on your network experience from “medium” to “high”. I like to run my setup at “medium” since high requires more bandwidth and I personally didn’t notice that much better performance improvement using high over medium. I am satisfied with the default “medium” configuration.

    I hope I answered your questions and didn’t scare anyone off more or less… All I can truly say is to actually see this thing operate amazes me in my opinion. Perhaps because I’ve been chomping at the bit for 10+ years to have such technology at my disposal and to finally be able to have every computer in my house communicate to my TV with a single click of a button was what truly sold me on the product and as a customer of 3 months, I couldn’t go back to a tethered experience.

  8. @evan,

    Thanks again.

    Okay, normally 720p would mean 720p/60 i.e. 60fps since its progressive rather than interlaced. And this is 720p/30 so the bandwidth requirements are lowered. Probably fine for movies and not so good for sports.

    Still though 500kbps. For an h.264 720p/30 encode. That’s very aggressive.

    I can’t imagine it looking as good as you say it does but hey, you’re the one looking at it. I would expect it to have problems with anything challenging–pan the camera (as in football) where the whole image changes, watch a waterfall or a crackling fire (almost anything red really). I bet it has pretty bad macroblocking/artifacts or the frame rate goes to hell.

    I’d have thought 1Mbps would be a good target. But hey, its their product and I haven’t seen it. Maybe they’ve had a breakthrough in h.264 encoding. Doubt it though.

  10. Dave. I saw you linked to your post in the comments section within today’s engadget “coverage” of mctivia. I don’t get why now they mention it even though I sent them a friendly e-mail about your post weeks ago and i don’t really understand the purpose of engadget’s post when there’s nothing interesting included in it.

  11. Just to be clear, this essentially Mirrors what’s on your Laptop/Desktop screen. So, you’re still out a screen while watching a movie. You can’t surf the web on your laptop while watching the movie on the TV because it essentially mirrors the laptop screen.

  12. Evan, I assume they were led astray by by a reseller that fired off a retail distribution press release and (obviously) wasn’t aware McTiVia has been available.

  13. @Dave. That makes sense then.

    @Francis. If there existed a projection unit that had the MirrorOp software built into it and also wifi/ethernet, it too could then project your computer screen, for example, to a white wall/canvas with out any wires. That would be pretty slick — a wireless projection unit!

    The different is the mctivia hardware connects to a television via hdmi, but just like a projector, it simply mirrors what is on your computer for your audience to see on a big screen television instead of the audience crowded around your 15″ laptop screen, etc.

    “So, you’re still out a screen while watching a movie. You can’t surf the web on your laptop while watching the movie on the TV because it essentially mirrors the laptop screen.”

    What you’re saying is true, but that would be for any product that mirrors and projects its screen onto another screen. So, the solution in your description would be to have a second computer that’s not busy sharing your screen with your audience.

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