Announcing the TVersity Screen Server

We are delighted to announce today the TVersity Screen Server - a different kind of media server optimized for streaming the contents of your PC screen to a wide range of devices.

We have received over the years many requests for this feature and have developed a prototype of it about two and a half years ago, however we could not include it in the TVersity Media Server for technical reasons. If you are tech savvy and want to know more here it is… the Media Server runs as a service and therefore has no access to your Windows desktop, it has its own virtual desktop that is always just black. Moreover on XP, one needed to disable hardware acceleration and capturing the audio was problematic as well. So.. we shelved it.

Recently we started receiving again requests for this feature (maybe because of twitch.tv rising popularity?), and given that XP is a lot less popular and Windows 7 or newer are the norm we decided to give it another shot. In order to overcome the service issue, we ended up creating a separate product that runs when the user logs in and is independent from the media server. There were just too many differences in the use-cases addressed by the media server and the screen server that we had to split them to two separate products.

So.. this is it.. give it a shot and let us know how it goes. To make it easier for you to try and decide whether you like it or not, the Screen Server offers a free trial (limited to 15 minute screen mirroring sessions but you can start another one immediately so should allow you to evaluate the product without issues).

Some things to be aware of:

• It is highly recommended to change your screen resolution to 1280×720 before mirroring.

• It is also recommended to disable Windows aero.

• We wanted to allow you to mirror to all the devices supported by the Media Server and since they all do buffering before they start playing videos, you will have 5-15 seconds delay between your PC and your target device. This is not an issue because the use-case we are looking to address is watching videos or games (not playing games while looking at the mirrored screen).

• A capable CPU is definitely needed but we worked hard on optimizing it so on a 3 years old core i3 (2330M 2.2 Ghz) when running at 1280x720 and streaming to a PS3 the CPU is at an average of 15%, leaving most resources available for whatever it is your PC is doing.