Both the Xbox One and iMac were in my office, located about 30 feet away from the router, and I chose the Very High video quality option before launching. We’ve already shown we’ll embrace it.I initially tested OneCast using a regular Xbox One connected to my router with an Ethernet cable, and a late-2015 iMac (Intel Core i5, 16GB RAM, AMD Radeon R9) running macOS Sierra 10.12.6 and connected to my router on the 5GHz band. We like our Macs, Microsoft, but we also like the games you have on your system. If someone got the streaming service to work “simply” by reverse engineering it, imagine how much more efficient it could with Microsoft’s own team on the project. Ideally, though, Microsoft itself could extend support for its Xbox One streaming service to Macs, rendering the whole issue moot. The worst-case scenario is that Microsoft shuts the whole thing down, although there’s a chance the app itself will continue to work for a while after the site gets shuttered.Īs for the best case? For our pocketbooks, at least, it’s that Microsoft lets OneCast chug along without interference. In Microsoft’s case, the company isn’t really even losing money: You still need to have an Xbox One to use the service, so Satya Nadella and friends are still getting that sweet pile of cash from some Mac owners anyway. OneCast works so well that it serves as a reminder that developers can often rather easily release their products for Macs if they set their minds to it. I haven’t had a chance to see how well OneCast performs with the more powerful Xbox One S and Xbox One X consoles, but word from the rest of the internet suggests that the performance remains based on the strength of your internet connection more than anything else. PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds streaming to a MacBook Pro.Īlso, a bit of a warning: I was streaming from my first-generation Xbox One. At least it’s an alternative for those situations when someone’s hogging the TV or you’d like to play your Xbox games on your iMac or MacBook away from the usual spot. I’m not really sure what kinds of framerates I was getting since it’s a bit of a hassle to get a framerate counter running on a Mac these days, but I’d say it was struggling to reach 30fps on Wi-Fi. Once it did get going, though, it performed well enough that I was usually confident attributing my many deaths in the ultra-punishing platformer Cuphead to my own ineptitude rather than a subpar connection.Įven so, the experience wasn’t ideal, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend attempting to play competitive multiplayer games with the kind of performance I saw with the download speeds we were getting through our regular Wi-Fi connection. It performed well enough on OnceCast’s “High” settings, but it took a couple of minutes to get going. One of our Wi-Fi channels here downloads at around 15 MBps, which I figured was a reasonable speed for representing an ordinary connection at home. In fact, we sometimes noticed that action would sometimes seem to happen on the Mac’s stream before it would happen on the TV that was directly connected to the Xbox One. When I tried streaming with the land connection here in the office (which runs around 700 MBps during work hours), the transition was basically lossless aside from a couple of hiccups. (If you want to see OneCast in action, be sure to check out our episode of Apple Arcade at the top of the page.) On April 1, though, that’s going to jump up to 20 bucks.Īs with most streaming, performance is largely going to be based on your connection. OneCast also comes with a generous 14-day trial that lets you use the app as much as you want, after which you pay a currently discounted licensing fee of $9.99. We simply plugged in the Xbox’s IP address (found through the Xbox’s settings), and it worked fine. The one mishap was that OneCast couldn’t find the Xbox on our network. You can even add multiple Xbox Live profiles if you wish. On our network here at Macworld, I had a bit of trouble in that I had to manually had to enter my Xbox’s IP address into a prompt, but even with that extra step setup only took around five minutes. In essence, getting it to run requires little more thanĭownloading the app, installing it, making sure your Xbox One and Mac are on the same network, signing into Xbox Live through your Mac, and jumping into streaming. You can tell the makers of OneCast have an affection for Apple’s philosophy since it’s remarkably easy to set up. That’d be a jerk move, though, especially since OneCast proves this kind of technology can be ported to the Mac fairly easily and with a high degree of quality. But there’s no evidence that Microsoft approves of any of this, which means OneCast could vanish tomorrow or a couple of weeks from now if the developers get slapped with a cease-and-desist.
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