today I'm going to be doing an unboxing of something that's a little bit different from what I usually talk about
on my channel this is the mivia and what it is is essentially a way of wirelessly
transmitting uh HDMI data to your TV
from your Mac okay so let's go ahead and we'll have a look at the back this
actually won the best of show award at the at Mac World 2011
so here you go brings your Mac screen to HDTV via Wi-Fi and you can control your
Mac from the TV Okay so we've got like kind of a wirelessly looking symbol
we've got kind of a wirelessly looking symbol and a wirelessly looking symbol
it all goes here and then you are able to control it from your TV so your Mac
doesn't even actually have to be in the same room it works off Wi-Fi actually
here we can have a look at the Mac PC requirements really quick so it requires
a dual core 1.4 GHz or better requires a
graphics card with 128 Megs of RAM or more so pretty much anything in the
recent past uh macOS 10.5 plus okay
here's some recommended models excellent uh oh well okay apparently works on PC
as well look at that with Vista or Windows 7 okay well that's that's neaty
all right wirelessly bring the Mac screen to the TV with synchronized audio
even remotely operate your Mac from the TV with standard USB keyboard and mouse
also works as a home wireless access point that's cool and support for PC
sender for Windows 7 inista 3 additional software okay let's open this up and
have a look at it so the first thing we find inside is
please visit us for the latest drivers and firmware updates and manual
downloads hey that's great advice isn't it don't use this please visit us for
the latest thank you guys I appreciate that there is a quick installation guide
so since I'm actually curious about how to install this we are going to take a
closer look for a change all right before you start there are four setup
possibilities you can use Ethernet so that's going to give you the best
performance versus using Wireless all right next is using a power line adapter
power line provides very good performance I mean really it's it's
almost right up there with wired if you have good clean power in your house and
if you have a decent power line adapter so that's another good recommendation
partly Wireless that is reasonable performance
okay so if a wireless connection is preferred you can connect your home
access point and MC via cables and
access either from your home AP or from
mivia okay and then there's purely Wireless which is basic performance you
can also try setting up mivia as a wireless client to your home AP via AP
client mode however the setup is more complicated and vulnerable to any
interference in the Wi-Fi signal okay so
they give you a bunch of different options for how to use it and the video quality actually can scale with how good
your connection is so let's go ahead and see what we've got in here in terms of
accessories there's a box oh wow it's a lot smaller than I
thought look at this picture on the outside of the box looks like huge
doesn't it looks like the size of like a big home router but it's not at all okay
so why don't we let's check out the accessories first oh
boy lots of different adapters so I will be
needing this one that is actually a pretty neat way of doing this um rather
than create International versions of their product they create one skew make
sure it's got everything you need make sure that this is compatible with either
120 volt or 240 volt and then boom you
just clip in your thing if you're not planning on traveling anywhere in the
near future then you just throw these out because you clearly don't need them
and you just use the one you need okay so that's just an AC to DC adapter and
that will plug into the mivia obviously I'm going to be having to do a follow-up
video on this one showing you guys it's performance in the real world I'll
use I'll borrow a Mac from cameraman and
uh we'll probably demo it on the tech tips TV right behind me which does use
HDMI so it's got kind of a slick looking
mirror finish on it and it's got a couple of antennas
here here we are all right so we'll go ahead and
throw those on there pretty neat looking little box
actually but basically what you can do hold on I'm just going to finish up
getting this all assembled here and then I'll talk a little bit more about it
okay all right power button on the front
on the side you see some of the housing on the other side you see some of the
housing this feels like it's made of aluminum that would be my guess but uh
you know it feels very very solid it's got some some heft to it it doesn't feel
cheaply made at all you got rubber feet on the bottom so wherever you put it
down it's not going to well if you put it down on a cloth then OB L it can move
around but if you put it down on something that's not a cloth then it's
not going to move around at all all right on the back we have our Ethernet
port so that is the way to get the best performance you can also use that
Ethernet port with a powerline adapter that works very well as well then we
have wireless so you can use the Wireless in those two different ways
that we outlined before you have a USB port so you can use that to plug in a
standard keyboard mouse um Hub whatever the case may be you can use that to
wirelessly control your Mac even if it's not in the same room as you like if you
are using a powerline Ethernet for example your max upstairs boom use that
to control it and then we've got the HDMI out and that's going to go out to
your TV and finally we have a power in so I'm actually very excited to try out
this product stay tuned guys and I will be showing you the mivia in action