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Wyse TCX Multimedia 2.0: Enabling Multimedia in RDP/ICA/VDI

Thursday, 27 September 2007 by Michel Roth

The use of Server Based Computing / VDI environments is getting more and more graphically intense. Thin Clients are notorious for their poor graphical performance (I've written about this limitation and other limitations of Thin Clients beforehere). However, 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.

Al though Wyse has delivers some very decent graphical performance with their Thin Clients, there's definitely room for improvement. Wyse is aware of the current limitations of Thin Clients and has launched a special product line that focuses on dealing with the limitations. It is called Wyse TCX. This actually has been around for some time but recently they launched a important product called Wyse TCX Multimedia 2.0.

What is Wyse TCX Multimedia 2.0 about? Well, have you ever tried to play a video via RDP, ICA or in a Virtual Desktop? Probably not to often, with a good reason: the performance sucks big time. This is due to the very nature of the ICA en RDP protocol. What Wyse TCX Multimedia 2.0 basically does is allow you to play multimedia streams locally on your Thin Client, without requiring any fuss with codecs, content or any of that stuff. It's completely transparent. Wyse TCX Multimedia 2.0 does require a software component on the Thin Clients as well as on the Citrix or Terminal Servers. In a VMWare environments Wyse TCX Multimedia 2.0 is incorporated in VMware tools 3.0.2 (released with ESX 3.0.2). Here's an overview how it works:

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The advantages are clear:
Lower network load: the videofile only traverses the connection once in encoded form (up to 40% lower bandwidth utilization)
Less strain on the server: playing video files can be quite CPU intensive. Using the Thin Client CPU with TCS lowers the load on the server CPU
Decent video performance on Thin Clients in a RDP, ICA or a Virtual Desktop session. Supposedly better than a PC on a RDP, ICA or a Virtual Desktop session.

These are the official TCX Multimedia 2.0 features:
Supported Media Formats: Mpeg1, Mpeg2, Mpeg4-part2, WMV 7/8/9, WMA, MP3, AC3
Play-list support
Flexible playback methods supported:Local media files, Browser plug-in,Network share, HTTP, FTP
UDP/RTP Multicast support

TCX Multimedia 2.0 is designed to run on any Wyse thin client with a 800Mhz processor or better which means their V Class L or LE, or Wyse's new X Class thin laptop. Its available now for Wyse Thin OS on the V10L, the CE and XPe versions are in beta test and Linux will come in a couple of months. Now this of course all sounds very cool but I'd like to see this for myself. This is why I will be testing TCX Multimedia 2.0 myself. I'll report back with my findings (in the form of some comparison movie). To be continued...