It was last September that I blogged about a new product that Wyse had brought to market: Wyse TCX Multimedia 2.0. I was intrigued by the concept. And decided to see for myself if Wyse TCX Multimedia 2.0 really worked. This article discusses my findings.

Why?

Well, I think the use of Server Based Computing / VDI environments is getting more and more graphically intense and, as we all know, SBC and VDI environments are notorious for their poor multimedia performance. In my experience, most of the times Thin Clients tend to exaggerate that problem. However this depends heavily on the type of Thin Client you use. I have to say, of the Thin Client vendors out there, I've always found that Wyse Thin Clients deliver the best graphical performance (and No, Wyse is not paying me to say that). Note that I am talking about real Thin Clients, not Thin Clients that have a PCI-X slot with a $450 graphics card inserted. 

Test Setup

So I got hold of a Wyse evaluation unit with TCX 2.0. This device was a Wyse Winterm V10L with the Wyse ThinOS. The unit has 128 MB DDR2 MB of memory and a 800 Mhz VIA CPU. The solution consists of two components: one serverside component and one client side component. The client side component is embedded into the current ThinOS version so you do not need to do anything about that. All the need to do on the client side is to make sure that you have a valid Wyse TCX Multimedia 2.0 license key entered into your wnos.ini (the Wyse ThinOS configuration file). On the server side you need to install the Wyse TCX Multimedia 2.0 component as well. This is a very simple installation and in the end just installs a DLL. This DLL is loaded to intercept any requests being done in a session. The server then sends the multimedia file (compressed) to the client device where it is rendered locally on the Thin Client. Refer to this diagram for a more detailed review of the process:

This functionality is in concept similar to SpeedScreen Multimedia Acceleration that Citrix offers in Presentation Server today. SpeedScreen Multimedia Acceleration however only is available for Windows clients.

What I wanted to test  

In my lab I set up a Citrix Presentation Server 4.5 FP1 environment in VMware. I then used the evaluation Wyse V10L to connect to this Citrix server and play a movie using a published Windows Media Player. I played the movie in the published Media Player with and without Wyse TCX Multimedia 2.0 enabled. I wanted to check three things: 1. The video experience: Of course I wanted to know if the video played smoothly. Now this is trickier than you might think. I could see and hear it in my lab but how was I going to show it to you? Well, I ended up recording my the video and sound playback from my home lab with my digital video camera. But that is only half the trouble. I then tried to edit the video with to produce it in a more "web-friendly" format. The problem is that with every edit or conversion I lost some more video quality. This is something I did not want to happen because it blurs the results of my testing. So in the end (after a lot of fiddling with video editing programs) I am just going to post the raw MPG files. If you cannot play them because of a missing coded, try the free VLC media player. Otherwise, I'm afraid I can't help you. 2. The CPU usage: we all know that rendering video is a very CPU intensive task. In SBC /VDI environments where relatively less CPU power is shared between many users is would be a good thing if Wyse TCX Multimedia 2.0 offloaded CPU usage to the Thin Client unit. 3. The bandwidth usage: The ICA and RDP protocols are very slim protocols by design. But they were not designed to deliver video. This is why, after rendering the video on the server, the data being sent trough ICA is quite voluminous. So in the test I wanted to see whether or not Wyse TCX Multimedia 2.0 used less bandwidth. Note that Wyse TCX Multimedia 2.0 does a bit more than just play Client to Server MPGs. The full feature set encompasses more media formats (Mpeg1, Mpeg2, Mpeg4-part2, WMV 7/8/9, WMA, MP3 and AC3), play-list support, other playback methods (local media files, browser plug-in, network share, HTTP, FTP) and UDP/RTP Multicast support. I did not test all these other features.

The Results

Up front, I would like you to know that the results of these tests are very difficult to present to you. To really show the difference in user experience is very hard. I had to capture the multimedia experience with the best video quality (DVD). So I recorded it with my digital camera. But even this encoding did lose some of the "smoothness" of the "live" video. To make the movies accessible to the multitude of Thincomputing.net readers, I had to recode the DVD movie to a flash format which again causes some of the "smoothness" of the "live" video to be lost. The bottom line is that, although the difference should still be noticeable, it is a lot more noticeable in a live video.

The first test I did was playing the movie without TCX enabled. In the recording you'll see me pointing out that TCX is disabled by showing you the Thin Client log file. Again, this is a digital video recording of my monitor in my lab with sound coming from 6 year old speakers. I did not change the default audio quality setting for Presentation Server so it's "medium". 

The result of this test should not be a surprise to you. This is the quality you are used to. Actually, I was somewhat surprised at the relative good video quality. I expected less from a Thin Client connecting to a Presentation Server running in VMware. In the second test I enabled TCX. Again, the recording demonstrates that TCX is enabled by showing the V10L log. In my lab, watching the live demo, really showed my quite a difference in video quality. I've noticed that recording it with my digital video camera did loose some of the "smoothness" of the "live" video. The difference in audio quality is still very audible.

Next is a small perform monitor that I ran on the Citrix server during the video playback. I measured the CPU time and the network output. Normally these counters would not suffice because other processes could interfere with the results. Don't worry, I checked this vanilla Citrix servers did (of course) not have any other users logged on and no other processes used more CPU of bandwidth than they normally would.  

From the screenshot shown above we can see that playing the video puts quite a strain on the CPU. Also there's a decent amount of network bandwidth. Compare this to the performance monitor I ran during the test when TCX was enabled:  

We can see that the load on the CPU is significantly lower and that the usage of network bandwidth is also significantly lower. One odd thing that I kept seeing in performance monitor with TCX enabled was the big spike in network usage at the beginning of the test. This spike was there every time I ran the test. The spike we are seeing at the beginning of playback is because the V10L first fills a buffer so that it can cope with variations in the network caused like changes in network conditions (e.g. jitter) or short network disconnects caused by poor conditions (for example a VMotion in VDI environments).

Conclusion

In this short test we took a look at Wyse TCX Multimedia 2.0. The question of course is whether it is any good. I think it depends. I can honestly tell you that the improvement in video and (even more in) audio quality is definitely there. It's not entirely as good as the playback is on a local device but it comes really close. Wyse TCX Multimedia 2.0 of course is not free. Retail price is at €24 / $33 per device. I can certainly see the benefits of using this solution if you already have a large Wyse Thin Client infrastructure in place and if the end users of that environments typically do a lot of video. One thing that is really missing is the support for flash video. Nearly all of the videos that e comes across on the web these days is flash video. Think about it. It's not only YouTube, but a some of these animated advertisement on websites are also flash videos. Flash video support is something that is planned for the first half of 2008. If the price stays the same, this would make it very interesting.