Best Quality AirPlay streaming App?

[tarasis]

I am trying to find an app that provides the closest experience to a 720p mkv file for playing on an non jail broken Apple TV 2.

So far I've tried AirVideo and StreamToMe and of the two, STM is the closest though not perfect (for instance the image is zoomed in a bit, despite playing with the toggle) compared to playing the video via VLC on the Mac (both MacMini and ATV are connected to the TV, so I can pause on a particular second and compare the screens).

I found AirVideo very blocky in comparison to STM, going via Erica Sudan's AirFlick app didn't improve the experience. (which admittedly was using AirVideo Server in the background)

Are there any other options outside of jailbreaking or copying data to an iPad to stream to the TV via AirPlay?

Can one convert to mp4 without loss of quality, or much quality?

 

[slothrob]

Can one convert to mp4 without loss of quality, or much quality?

Handbrake will convert 720p to .m4v video with minimal-to-no perceptible loss in quality, allowing it to play on the aTV2 without jail-breaking.

 

[peterjcat]

Since MP4 and MKV are just containers, you can repackage one to the other with zero quality loss. Provided your MKVs have H.264 video you can remux to MP4 using Subler, MP4tools, iFlicks, iVI etc. It's very quick and the video quality is identical to the original. I like iFlicks because you can queue up a load of movies, you wind up with AC3+AAC audio and good metadata tagging. Handbrake is only needed when the underlying video is incompatible.

If you don't want to convert, then Plex will do this on the fly -- identify compatible video streams and repackage them without transcoding where possible. You can then AirPlay the results to the ATV2. It should work great on your MKVs.

 

[tarasis]

Thank you peterjcat for the iFlicks tip, trialling it at the moment and its certainly doing the trick for mkv's.

Still working out the best option for avi files.

 

[peterjcat]

Thank you peterjcat for the iFlicks tip, trialling it at the moment and its certainly doing the trick for mkv's.

Still working out the best option for avi files.

It'll work for many AVI files too, it'd be worth testing yours and see how many of them work. I think it's a bit more hit-and-miss since in the early days things weren't very standardised so there were a few crazy codecs and parameters being used.