The discussion here is around Airplay Mirroring which requires on the fly h.264 encoding of your computer screen in order to play on the AppleTV. Running overnight doesn't fix the problem of being able to do this....
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
airplay sys requirements ?
- Thread starter UKBeast
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
The discussion here is around Airplay Mirroring which requires on the fly h.264 encoding of your computer screen in order to play on the AppleTV. Running overnight doesn't fix the problem of being able to do this....
I also have an early 2009. I set AirParrot on medium quality/30fps. It stutters and AirParrot TS (which is very responsive by the way) told me that I basically did not have enough horse power to not have stuttering. How you do not experience the same thing is interesting.I have a late 2009 Mac book with 8 gigs of ram.....Since I can't get air sharing with mountain lionand it was the only feature I was really looking forward to I will stick with snow leopard. I bought Airparrot and have been very happy with it. I did turn the quality setting down to medium so it is far from HD...but it is not choppy playing avi movies and can do flash websites without any stuttering (my cpu sits at about 60% utilization when pushing a flash video website to my TV and about 40% when doing an avi movie)
If you want to stream the video in super high quality with an older mac Airparrot prob won't do very well.....but if you are like me and are happy with average video quality (I turned down the settings to the lowest level that still gave me okay quality) you will be very happy with airparrot it is a great piece of software IMHO and is worth $10!
Depends on the settings, disable 1080p, make the quality low and it works perfect. I want to get the best quality so i give up on airplay..
I did try both lowering the quality to low and disabling 1080p. It was so blocky it was unwatchable. I assume the external GPU can't be used for on the fly transcoding because it is just designed to accelerate "screen" graphics? Is that correct?
Anyway, I can always you my wife's iPad to mirror. Just requires me to unclench her fingers from around it.
I did try both lowering the quality to low and disabling 1080p. It was so blocky it was unwatchable. I assume the external GPU can't be used for on the fly transcoding because it is just designed to accelerate "screen" graphics? Is that correct?
Anyway, I can always you my wife's iPad to mirror. Just requires me to unclench her fingers from around it.
what gpu have you got ?
Mine is 320m maybe that is the difference.
Can you stream 1080p mkv perfectly with ipad 3 ?
Well that's never going to happen on a C2D computer. Just giving the OP some options aside from outright selling his MBP and buying a new one.
There are many options, AirPlay with OTF transcoding isn't one.
I haven't tried mirroring 1080p mkv using the iPad. We have mirrored some website video's however and they look have not stuttered, which is an improvement over AirParrot.
Not sure it's really worth pursuing mirroring movies. I have all of them converted to mp4 (but archived as mkv/iso). I am sure that the Handbrake transcoding is going to give superior quality to any on the fly transcoding done by either AirParrot or iPad. My real need is to avoid transcoding entirely, which means waiting for a jailbreak or, as I do now, connect the MBP directly to my HDTV using HDMI.
Actually all need for the airplay function is to avoid transcoding and watching all avi movies. I hate encoding, I hate any cpu intensive tasks. This is the only reason why I want to jailbreak it, to untie atv from itunes and its mp4 rules.
Best is to wait the jailbreak comes up ,but it has taken too long, we might never get jailbreak
sounds like a nightmareHmmmm that sucks.....I can only tell of my real world experiences....late 2009 macbook 8gigs ram with apple tv3....with the quality down to medium I found the quality acceptable for my avi and flash video watching......I have about 5 hours of actual watch time so far and it has been holding up.....I have had the quality set to low and I could not deal with the poor quality at that level....have not tried it on high quality yet as I did not expect my macbook to keep up but I should try for fum
http://bohoonkim.blogspot.com/2011/01/mkv-files-and-perian-quicktime-kplayer.html
if you follow the instructions.
Install perian and play mkv files with quicktime you will get faster user experience with airparrot. Because its taking the burdon on cpu to 320m gpu and rest of cpu is used for airparrot.
if you follow the instructions.
Install perian and play mkv files with quicktime you will get faster user experience with airparrot. Because its taking the burdon on cpu to 320m gpu and rest of cpu is used for airparrot.
I'll give it a shot. You must have done some very deep searching to find that little tidbit.
Last edited:
Quicktime/AirParrot & CPU Usage
Tried Quicktime X. (Already had Perian installed). Quicktime will not load mkv's. After cranking for a long while, I get a message saying I need to use Quicktime 7. Tried Quicktime 7 and it loads, very slowly, but it does load. Playback is extremely uneven with quick pauses all over the place (even though the file is completely loaded). And I didn't even get to the AirParrot test. Unless someone has more info on what I should do using this route, it was a failure for me.
Update: I tried using VLC with my GeForce 9400 on. It seemed to help my CPU usage. With my normal apps running, the CPU idle was at 40%, with no other apps running, it was around 50% idle. Airparrot was set to 720p and highest quality. Unfortunately, there was still a very slight jitter (it almost looks like slow motion). I also tried hooking the HD directly to the MBP (normally connected to the TC) and connecting the MBP to the TC by ethernet. Nothing seemed to improve the jitter. It is slight, but it is there. I find it hard to buy that it is not enough CPU to do on the fly transcoding, when my CPU is at 50% idle.
Tried Quicktime X. (Already had Perian installed). Quicktime will not load mkv's. After cranking for a long while, I get a message saying I need to use Quicktime 7. Tried Quicktime 7 and it loads, very slowly, but it does load. Playback is extremely uneven with quick pauses all over the place (even though the file is completely loaded). And I didn't even get to the AirParrot test. Unless someone has more info on what I should do using this route, it was a failure for me.
Update: I tried using VLC with my GeForce 9400 on. It seemed to help my CPU usage. With my normal apps running, the CPU idle was at 40%, with no other apps running, it was around 50% idle. Airparrot was set to 720p and highest quality. Unfortunately, there was still a very slight jitter (it almost looks like slow motion). I also tried hooking the HD directly to the MBP (normally connected to the TC) and connecting the MBP to the TC by ethernet. Nothing seemed to improve the jitter. It is slight, but it is there. I find it hard to buy that it is not enough CPU to do on the fly transcoding, when my CPU is at 50% idle.
Last edited:
The point here is taking the burdon on cpu from media player so that airparrot can use it as much as it needs.
Some applications like perian with quicktime can get the benefit from gpu and play files with very low cpu usage but does only work on x264 encoded mkv or mp4 or m4v files. Hardware Acceleration.
If you cant success on quicktime, then give http://bohoonkim.blogspot.com/search/label/KPlayer
kplayer a try but there is no trial or something available.
Another option is Beamer
http://beamer-app.com/
This is doing on the fly encoding and playing almost every file i do not see any jitter but cpu load is over %100 which is not really when you are using a laptop computer.