Veebeam HD review

In an age of online and on-demand TV viewing it seems strange that we haven’t seen more devices like the Veebeam. We tested the HD model, priced competitively against the Apple TV, and the benefits soon became obvious.

While plenty of people have begun enjoying content online, it’s not so easy to view the same content on a TV. The current options are to hook your MacBook up to the TV and relinquish its other uses or buy an Apple TV or Roku box. The latter methods tie you to specific content and, in some cases, you may even need to pay to watch content again via iTunes. Veebeam aims to return control to you, in HD and wirelessly too, bringing everything and anything you can watch on your Mac to your TV.

Coming in two parts, an HDMI-connected receiver and a USB dongle, Veebeam streams video from Mac to TV in two ways. The first is, as you’d expect, a simple stream from your desktop to the television called Screencasting mode. The second method plays media files stored locally on your Mac.

Unfortunately for those who enjoy streaming content from the web, Screencasting mode has to take over your Mac’s screen in order to play on the TV. However, if you play files stored on your Mac, you can continue to use the computer for other tasks while they play on your television.

We had a little trouble connecting the Veebeam at first, but found that after tweaking the Snow Leopard Firewall everything ran smoothly. The Veebeam relies on a line-of-sight connection but in our tests it worked behind the TV at a good 10ft or more from the laptop without any hiccups.

That said, the couple of seconds lag between what’s shown on your desktop and on the TV makes control a little tricky if you’re looking at the screen and using the laptop’s trackpad, but for playback the video and audio look just fine. And look even better if it’s in 1080p HD, especially in comparison to the Apple TV’s 720p.