AirVideo-2000 in Action

Using a monitor instead of a projector poses no problem. As you can clearly see in our setup, there is no physical cable going from the Dell XPS M1330 to the Airlive AirVideo-2000. The notebook has access to the AirVideo through the wireless LAN interface and the webbrowser shows the web interface. This is what you will see once everything is up and running. The two speakers were connected directly to the audio jack on the AirVideo-2000.


The initial screen on the output display shows various information. On the top left corner is a four digit PIN. This is required to gain access to the output device and to project your windows desktop or media. The PIN always changes so you will need to have visual contact to the display to log in. The bottom left corner holds some general information. The SSID, IP, WLAN channel, WEP status and display resolution is displayed.


Using the Airvideo-2000 to project the Windows desktop works just as expected. Everything you do on your notebook can be seen on the big screen. I have opened up Wordpad and simply entered a few lines of text. There is just a very slight lag but this was to be expected considering the wireless interface. Next, a video file was played and projected on the monitor. Both a CD and the hard drive of the notebook were used as a source of the movie. While it was possible to play the movie off the CD and display it, fast forwarding was not. The seek time of the CD in such a case, causes a time out and the video play back is stopped, since the AirVideo-2000 requires a constant datastream, otherwise it will fall back to the title screen. Using the internal hard drive as a medium posed no problems at all. The video and audio is always in sync and there are no visual artifacts. Playing audio is possible as well. Doing so leaves the display black, but the audio is clearly heard from the speakers. After using the AirVideo-2000 for some time, it became quite warm to the touch. but this caused no problems at all.

I also tried the AirVideo-2000 with a few games. With some, the starting screen and menus work. But as soon as you try to enter a game, either the AirVideo-2000 reset back to the mainscreen or the notebook was not able to handle the configuration of streaming the information over the wireless Interface. Airlive is using a combination of wireless and some sort of virtual monitor to clone the desktop of the notebook. The NVIDIA driver always shows a message that it does not know what to do with the additional display, as soon as you connect to the AirVideo unit. Even though games do not work, that is not the intended purpose of the AirVideo anyways.