Maxivista v4 Mirror Pro Review

Monitors don’t cost a fortune anymore. I remember buying my iiyama 21″ TFT in 2004 and I also remember that it wasn’t cheap.

With the advent of technologies like Eyefinity even non-professional users crave for more screen estate – and the industry is happy to oblige. But there’s one big problem: There’s no room left on my desktop. Mobile phones, laptops, trinkets, joypads of all sorts as well as beverages fight for their spots. But hey, what if we could just recycle some of the screens we already have on our desktops?

Enter Maxivista, a software that allows Windows systems to extend their screen estate by utilizing other Windows/OSX|iOS systems’ screens. The idea isn’t new and there’s also a free program called ZoneOS ZoneScreen that basically does the same (minus the OSX|iOS compatibility) plus a few mediocre solutions geared towards tablet/smartphone compatibility.

Papers and tech demos are fine – but does Maxivista really work well in everyday use?

Let me write up front that I tested MaxiVista v4 Mirror Pro which is the latest and greatest version with all the bells and whistles. If it’s not in here, it ain’t there. With a price tag of 99 EUR the software is not exactly a bargain, add a few more Euros and you could get a nice new monitor.

There are a few limitations with MaxiVista:

  • Aero will not work while MaxiVista is active.
    I don’t really care for blurred windows and transparency, so I’m fine with this. However – this also means that kinky stuff like overlays or accelerated graphics operations won’t work either. So while you can watch a movie on your host’s screen, you cannot drag the window to a MaxiVista screen and continue; there’s no cpu-based drawing fallback. This means that applications like XSplit will not work on MaxiVista screens.
  • You can use a maximum of 3 machines as slaves.
    If I interpret the FAQ correctly each of these machines can have up to 2 screens connected to them, giving you a maximum of 6 additional screens. Personally I wouldn’t exactly call this a limitation since this gives you a lot of extra screen estate to play around with.
  • There’s an OSX/iOS version but no Linux/Android port.
    While I understand perfectly well that supporting a variety of platforms can be tricky, I’d really love at least an Android version of MaxiVista.

Bartels Media states these limitations on the MaxiVista homepage, so they don’t come as a surprise and we know what we’re getting into.

MaxiVista features a WDDM driver, enabling the program to work perfectly on a 64bit Windows system and is just so much more comfortable than ZoneScreen. Once the software is installed you can generate a viewer program for either 32bit or 64bit systems. Copy the viewer program onto the target machine (i.e. your laptop), run it and you’re pretty much done, Aero gets disabled automatically – zero configuration is required.

There is one thing that makes MaxiVista absolutely great: There are plenty of compression options to ensure you get the best performance out of your network. Whenever you feel that an applications displays too sluggish you can run an integrated optimization tool that really does a wonderful job of adapting the compression options to suit the application.

In the default settings MaxiVista isn’t much of a killer, this is most apparent when you’re trying to scroll through webpages on a MaxiVista screen for the first time: The scrolling is choppy, there’s tearing and general slowdown. Optimize the application by following the process’ instructions and you will barely notice that you’re working over the network. The screen will get a little choppy if you fill it completely with dynamic content which is expected and still above your average RDP, NX or VNC performance.

The performance and quality is good enough to watch videos fullscreen on a 1680×1050 screen over network in very good quality – if your CPU is powerful enough to handle the decoding in software.

While MaxiVista always gets demonstrated with WiFi (see demo videos on their homepage and on YouTube), I highly recommend a wired connection to get sharp, crisp images.

On the topic of picture quality: There is absolutely nothing to complain about. From your usual JPEG-artifact-ridden compression up to lossless, there is a setting for everyone. I got great results just optimizing for Google Chrome with great sharp fonts and bright, vibrant colors that do not bleed into neighbouring areas.

One thing I noticed during my test period are some infrequent crashes on the viewer. If you opt to install the viewer as a service that’s not much of a problem since all your programs still reside within the MaxiVista screen but annoying nevertheless.

There seems to be some weird outage whenever the resolution on the host machine switches (think: games starting up) that result in the MaxiVista screen losing connection, applications flying back to the host’s screen and immediatly back to the MaxiVista screen. Yuck!

For some reason applications will always start up on your host’s screen and migrate to the MaxiVista one. Again, it’s an annoyance, not a problem.

MaxiVista allows you to hide the expanded screen on a client so you can continue to use the machine. While the idea is a good one it does miss an option to disable the client’s keyboard/mouse and also lacks an option to prompt for a password before hiding the expanded screen.

If you’re planning to get the most basic of MaxiVista’s editions you can stop reading here because that’s all there is to it. The bigger editions come with some sort of Synergy-slash-InputDirector-slash-Multiplicity-esque software KVM feature that allows you to share a single keyboard/mouse plus the contents of your clipboard across multiple machines. While the idea of integrating this feature is a good one, the execution lacks the flexibility of the former programs. An option to switch machines via hotkey is not available, neither is sound transfer to the controlling machine (Multiplicity shows how to implement these features in a sane manner, imho).

Now if you remember the title of the post, you probably wonder when we get to the “Mirror” part. Well, additionally to the main screen-extension and software-KVM feature you also get a small feature to display the contents of your host’s screen on the client. It utilizes the same technology as the screen-extension feature so the image is crisp and the refresh rate is still good. A nifty feature would have been to integrate the option of actually controlling the MaxiVista/host screen from one of the clients (think of it as a reverse KVM) – but sadly that’s not possible, thus making VNC a more affordable and flexible option for these use cases.

Bottom line: is MaxiVista worth the money? The answer is a big “yes” with a small “but”. If space on your desktop is limited or you are under constraints by your device (old laptop or desktop machine) and you keep the limitations of the software in mind you’ll find that MaxiVista is a fantastic piece of software with a few minor annoyances. The extra features you get with Mirror Pro are nice but not really a big deal, especially considering that there are other solutions that outperform MaxiVista in the aspects of KVM and display mirroring. But you’ll be hard-pressed to find a software that works as easy and well as MaxiVista’s core.

If you’re on Linux you’re out of the game. MaxiVista is proprietary software and the protocol is not open.

Windows 7 – Enable concurrent RDP + multiple sessions per user

Let’s all admit it: Microsoft is still a bitch. Nowadays they try to push Metro down our throats, in the past they artificially limited the number of concurrent RDP sessions – and what’s worse: Limited the sessions to 1 per user on their client operating-systems. There’s no reason for limiting RDP on client systems (except for making it a premium feature) but a ton of scenarios where I need to be able to log-on more than once [with the same username] onto my workstation. Now, if you’re on a non-Ultimate version of Windows 7 you might be out of luck, but if you run Ultimate the following might be just what you’re looking for: Enter Concurrent RDP Patcher. Applying the patch is simple: Download, unpack and run it. Afterwards you’ll need to make a small change to your registry. Navigate to: 

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server

and create/modify the following DWORD value with the value 0: 

fSingleSessionPerUser

After a simple reboot you’ll be able to connect to your machine – multiple times. As usual when putting your fingers where they don’t belong, make sure you keep a backup of your original termsrv.dll (can be found in your system32 directory) before getting started.

Softsubs and XSplit

One of the things many people miss from XSplit is the ability to add a subtitle renderer like VSFilter to the graph. It simply doesn’t work – no matter how much you force HaaliSplitter to load VSFilter or ffdshow to enable the subtitle renderer – the subs won’t show.

As with so many other things in life there’s a workaround that sort of works: You can use Dxtory’s virtual camera to capture the window of (for example) MPC – including the already rendered subtitles. That way you can get the subs to show up.

Getting Unreal Tournament (1999) working on current Linux distros

Let’s be honest: Unreal Tournament, or UT99, is not only a piece of gaming history – it’s also still a very vibrant and active game. What’s even better: The game has a native Linux client, so there’s no shortage of fun to be had.

But there’s a problem: The client was made around the year 2000 and Linux has evolved since that time. There are a few guides around to help installing and troubleshooting UT on Linux but I didn’t find them particularly helpful. So here’s my attempt, maybe some will find it somewhat useful.

Please note that this is specifically for the original version of the game, not the Game of the Year or GOG editions.

What we need:

1. Insert the CD-ROM into your drive and be sure to mount it to /cdrom.

2. Install UT by using the Loki installer:

$ export _POSIX2_VERSION=199209
$ chmod +x ut-install-436.run
$ ./ut-install-436.run

If the installer won’t run because you’re on x86-64, simply start it by using ./ut-install-436.run –keep, browse the new ut-436 subdirectory and edit the setup.sh’s DetectARCH to look like this:

DetectARCH()
{
echo "x86"
return 0
}

Other errors can be ignored.

Now install the UTG patch 451 by unpacking it into your UT/System directory.

Open ~/.loki/ut/System/UnrealTournament.ini, find the line:

AudioDevice=ALAudio.ALAudioSubsystem

and replace it with:

AudioDevice=Audio.GenericAudioSubsystem

Now you should be able to start the game by typing:

padsp ./ut

 

To all those asking…

…and discussing whether .net is dead: No.

Even if Microsoft decides to scrape .net as their first class platform, there’s still a massive number of projects utilizing it. Heck, Windows Forms was supposed to be dead 2005 and it’s still rocking. And there’s Mono, too.

So why would you think .net is dead?

Philips IMAGEO LightStrip Color vs. Revoltec Backlight Set SMD-15

I’m a big sucker for light. Ever since Lupin started soldering his first lamps and introduced me to the world of nixie tubes I was hooked.

Admittedly I didn’t really care about lighting in my room until recently, though. With LED lamp prices on the low I didn’t have any excuse to not try a few of the things I always wanted to do anymore and ordered a few items off Amazon. My personal experience with a few pros and cons will be the content of today’s post.

The goal: Having a nice, adjustable illumination for both my display’s back (aka ambilight for cheap people like moi) as well as a bit of dynamic light for my figurine shelf.

The items I ordered off Amazon:

  • Philips IMAGEO LightStrip Color, currently selling for about 30 EUR
  • Revoltec Backlight Set SMD-15, currently selling for about 33 EUR

Philips IMAGEO LightStrip Color

I like Philips products – at least in general. I’m in love with the LivingColors LED lamp (unfortunately a bit overpriced for what it does…) and wouldn’t want to miss it anymore. The LightStrip Color is – per se – a good product. It’s made out of sturdy, elegant material with a nice brushed metal finish. What stands out is the use of real RGB LEDs over 3 single coloured ones set to a group, so the colors are consistent on every position of the strip. The cable system seems smart to me, you can remove the end of each LightStrip to connect either another one or a cable. The colors look crisp and there’s no problem with the brightness.

However – and this is a big fat “F” like in “what did they think when they fscking made this?” – there are a few caveats. The LightStrip comes with an AC adapter – but the cable is ridiculously short. To make matters worse, the control unit for power and color are set about 15cm after the AC adapter itself. A setup like that makes it hard to use i.e. power-plugs in hard-to-reach positions. Another big fat “booh” goes to the missing color mixer – it’s either the fixed set of colors, the rainbow mode that cycles through all shades of beautiful colors or “off”. Same goes for the non-available dimming.

Revoltec Backlight Set SMD-15

The Revoltec set sets out strong by giving you a remote control and two strips right out of the box. It lets you mix freely, you can set colors for either all strips or cycle through them, there’s a rainbow mode, dimming, profiles and a sleep timer. The cable lenghts are great and allow for complex setups.

Although the strip is rather plastic-ey it works very well. Connecting multiple strips works over a USB hub (included), so a star-structure is imperative. All these great features packed into 32 EUR? How does that work? Well, instead of using RGB LEDs like Philips, Revoltec uses a setup of red, green and blue LEDs and mixes them through PWM. The colors do look great but of course – depending on the position on the strip – the results vary. This isn’t much of a buzzkill, though.

The verdict

Despite the somewhat cheaper LEDs I would definitely recommend the Revoltec set. It’s extendable up to 6 strips and controlling them is easy and fun. You can’t go wrong with 32 EUR and you get quite a lot of value for your money. I’d say this set is ideal for backlighting your displays – if you want to showcase figurines in good light the 3-LED mixing gets in the way.

The Philips product suffers from several inconsistencies, missing features and incompatibility between their own product series but stands strong with the great quality and components.

Which one you choose for you is probably a matter of taste and/or application. If you want to have a clear illumination, there’s no way around RGB LED-based solutions. For display backlights this doesn’t really matter.

Running PPD – Project DXXX on Windows 7

Project DXXX is a fan-made program that allows you to drop videos and special rhythm files into a directory and get a somewhat Project Diva-like experience on the PC.

It’s a nice change from the usual Project Diva on my PSP or PS3, so I gave it a go. The only problem after following the Windows 7 setup instructions in the wiki: Still no video.

The solution is simple: I have the Haali Media Splitter installed and had it set to use a custom media type format for h.264. Simply go to the Haali options, set the value to “No” in the options and you’re good to go.

Using an external Flash plugin on Google Chrome

Chrome has a lot of nifty small features that make the software so great. The fact that it automatically updates the Flash plugin along it’s own program is one of them.

Unfortunately this can backfire sometimes. As a Linux user I currently don’t get hardware-accelerated decoding of video with the stable version of the Flash plugin Chrome ships.

Reading up on the topic I found the usual symlink tips that I believe are not the ideal solution. A better one is this:

  • Install your own choice of Flash plugin (for me it’s 11.2 at the time of writing)
  • Go to about:plugins
  • Expand the “Details” on the right side
  • Scroll down to the Flash plugin and disable the very first entry
  • Restart Chrome and enjoy

This way I can still maintain my own Flash version with full hardware-accelerated video-decoding while having a safe fallback in Chrome in case the beta goes haywire. Cool stuff.

Updating WordPress without using FTP

FTP. It’s so… 80s… It’s based around the thought that network traffic probably won’t be sniffed and that the guy next to me won’t crawl through my files. Basically it’s a relic from a time when people thought the internet would be a glorious place to advance mankind rather than being the world’s biggest contest of who can hoard the biggest amount of porn.

Coincidentally SSH was created 1995, about 10 years after FTP to clean up with the mess of uncrypted 80s protocols. In today’s modern computing world, SSH is basically the standard for safe and versatile command-line access and port-forwarding.

Why am I writing all of this? Well, Jidder did the right thing and disabled FTP on this server, leaving only SSH to update and maintain my WordPress installation. The thing is: WordPress doesn’t really like SSH all that much. But as usual, there are mysterious and dark ways around it.

Updating WordPress installations through SSH – How I loved rsync once again

Did I mention that SSH is great? I’m sure I did. Another great tool is rsync. And wget. Gosh, there are so many of them. But let’s focus on rsync right now. You can manually download the WordPress update package with wget and unzip it. But when it comes to moving the files around – there will be blood. mv doesn’t like it when you move non-empty directories onto other non-empty directories and starts crying.

Thankfully rsync isn’t such a pansy. Yeah, you heard me, mv!

rsync -arv --remove-source-files * ../blog/.

That’s all it takes for rsync to move all the files from your wordpress-* directory to your blog. That’s one way to update WordPress without FTP access. But there’s a small problem with this: Updating your hundreds of plugins that way takes time. It’s inconvenient. It’s no good.

The dark art of config-editing – Getting more… direct

A somewhat better way would be to let WordPress use your login and do all the dirty work itself. Lo and behold, that is indeed possible with a few simple, additional lines to your wp-config.php:

define('FS_METHOD', 'direct');
define('FTP_BASE', '/var/www/whatever/you/like/');
define('FTP_CONTENT_DIR', '/var/www/whatever/you/like/wp-content/');
define('FTP_PLUGIN_DIR', '/var/www/whatever/you/like/wp-content/plugins/');
define('FTP_HOST', 'host.domain:22');
define('FTP_USER', 'my_username'); 
define('FTP_PASS', 'my_password');

Don’t forget to adjust your permissions on the wp-content/plugins folder to ensure the user your web-server runs in can access/write to the directories (for updating plugins).

 

Fixing Newshosting’s GTK+ crash on startup

So yeah, I’m a big fan of Newshosting. The best thing about them is probably that they have their own (very capable) desktop-client and that aforementioned client is available for your major operating-system of choice (namely Windows, Linux and OSX).

A problem I ran into while trying out the program: As long as I am in a GNOME session, the client would crash on startup with a message like “(<unknown>:10800): GdkPixbuf-WARNING **: Bug! loader ‘png’ didn’t set an error on failure”.

After throwing my problem at Google I came across this nifty post that presented me with a straight-forward solution:

Just run as root:

update-mime /usr/share/mime/
update-mime-database /usr/share/mime/
gtk-update-icon-cache /usr/share/icons/YourTheme

Logout/Login and it will be all right now 🙂

And all right it was, indeed. Thank you, internet!

WinSCP alternative for GNU/Linux desktops

Let’s be honest: While it’s okay to work on the command line, I do prefer to use a graphical application for file-operations.

On Windows you can use WinSCP to work on remote systems via SSH. There are quite a number of questions whether there’s a good alternative for the GNU/Linux desktop available.

Filezilla is probably the premier choice when it comes to FTP clients but it is suprisingly well-groomed for SCP/SFTP as well. The application runs rather stable, doesn’t simply stop during file-transfers and also handles move/copy operations gracefully.

For my needs Filezilla is the best choice. It’s simple and does what it is supposed to do. Filezilla also sports a great “bookmark” system for different connections, allowing me to quicklyswitch between my web-hosts – no matter whether SCP or FTP.

In short: Go with Filezilla if you need an alternative to WinSCP for GNU/Linux.

Wuala isn’t dead

If you haven’t been living under a rock you probably heard that Wuala recently changed a few things. The trading feature has been removed for good, if you want to get your precious online storage without paying, your only chance is mining bitcoins now – which you can use to pay for extended storage programs on Wuala.

That sounds pretty bad, doesn’t it? The big feature that we all loved, the one feature that set Wuala apart from the rest, is gone. Booh hoo.

Let me tell you why Wuala is still the king of online storage: Pricing and the number of supported platforms.

No other hosted service gives you that much bang for your buck. For about 100€/year you get 100GB, that’s an incredibly good deal. If you believe Dropbox or an S3-based solution is cheaper you obviously need to check the prices again. Symform (no hard feelings, I love your service!) certainly looks attractive price-wise but falls short in the “team” or “group” aspect, thus making it a rather poor choice to compare against.

As for self-hosted solutions: If I already pay ~50-100€ per month for a (v)server and want to give my peer-group of 5 people access to 100GB of data, I better find a plan that comes with a flatrate for traffic – otherwise one month of self-hosting will cost me more than one year on Wuala. Even if I split the costs between my 5 peers, I’ll still end up with something more expensive.

Of course I’d love to see a more group-oriented, non-business plan that would allow me to donate space to my existing groups. I realize this is a big headache to implement – but it would be cool. 🙂

If you can name one service that runs on Windows, Linux, OSX, Android and iOS devices, integrates well into the big three’s file-systems, has social/group aspects, file-versioning, client-side encryption, intelligent caching and (soon) delta updates: Tell me, because I’d love to give that solution a go. 🙂

Wuala isn’t dead. At least not until the prices and platform availability of other products are on Wuala’s level. And let’s be honest: That will take a while.

I’m using the software since 2008 and still haven’t found a better way to share files with friends online. I tried Spideroak, Dropbox, Teamdrive, Ubuntu One and various other solutions I don’t even remember by name anymore and always came back to Wuala.

Gaikai Beta

Let’s face it: Upgrading a perfectly fine PC every year sucks. I’m still playing on my 4-year old gaming rig (not on high details and not the AAA titles, of course) but I do the rest of my daily routine on a small eeeBox running GNU/Linux. However, sometimes I’d like to play without booting up my gaming rig, searching for DVDs or waiting for Steam to finish a download. And I want to play on high detail, of course.

With OnLive and Gaikai this could become very much a choice. These services allow players to “stream” live games without installing them, without having to have the necessary graphic cards – all you need is a broadband internet connection.

While OnLive has had a very bad start with me (me being European and therefore undeserving of their service), Gaikai Inc.’s Gaikai service does allow European players to stream games live from the web.

Yesterday I got my beta pass to play the demos of Dead Space 2 and Mass Effect 2. The demos are limited to 30 minutes each – more than enough time to get a good view on the games and the cool technology Gaikai uses.

Remember that I’m on GNU/Linux here? Good. All you really need is a browser, the Flash plugin and Java.

The graphic quality is very good. I couldn’t get full-screen mode to work but expect this to be fixed before Gaikai goes gold. Sound is great, the response times for the controls are somewhat mushy – however that could also be due to the nature of the games. I remember Dead Space being fucking annoying in terms of controls and Mass Effect certainly wasn’t much better. So I guess I’d have to see Team Fortress II or some other adrenaline-loaded shooter to really make a call here.

So is this a service I’d use? Currently it’s hard to say. If Gaikai Inc. manages to get an all-genre catalogue of the cool & hip stuff from the publishers and translates their subscription model to a Crunchyroll-like “season pass” model, I certainly see myself tempted to use it. I’m already buying digital content from Steam, so why not skip the “upgrade, download, patch” cycle and go with Gaikai? At least for single-player games this is probably a good choice.

As for multi-player games… I think Steam is and will always be the platform of choice. People don’t want to be at disadvantage with even a few more milliseconds of input latency, so I don’t see cloud-gaming services in this sector.

I hope publishers will see the advantage of Gaikai’s services. Deploying demo versions of current generation games is nearly impossible (due to the size and complexity of the games) – so Gaikai is an attractive option. It also reduces the problem of piracy and ensures that people will always have the latest patches available.

The next year will be interesting. OnLive will finally start it’s European service (apparently), Gaikai may go live – it will be interesting to see which one of these services will make it easier to play on every platform and operating system. The games catalogue will be an interesting criteria as well. Let’s wait and see.

It’s like I’m in The Shining

So, as posativ pointed out the infamous Jugendmedienzensurstaatsvertrag is off the table (at least for now, although we all know proposals like this never die) – so let’s stick it to the man and keep the posts rolling.

What’s new?

If you’ve been wondering why tray icons in Ubuntu aren’t transparent, the answer is simple: The maintainers compile the applets with the wrong flags. To get your transparent tray icons back, do this:

– Grab the build-dependencies and the source for gnome-panel through apt-get
– Edit the debian/rules file and add the flag ”–with-in-process-applets=notification-area” to DEB_CONFIGURE_EXTRA_FLAGS
– Rebuild the package, install and enjoy.

Kind of sad that this problem seems to exist for a long time now and no one seems to care.

Thanks for all the fish.

Thanks to the ingenuity of German politicians I am required to either tag every article of this page for age restrictions and child protection  (an impossible task) or would have to authenticate you to make sure you are indeed over 18 years old (also an impossible task).

Another possibility would be to restrict access to this weblog based on the current time. But since I am not the administrator of this server and the FTP access is defunct for quite some time this is the only way I see right now.

So that’s why every article and every page on this blog are now offline.

Enjoy Tsukasa no Hibi (child-friendly version) in a clean, pure manner.