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Real Racing AirPlay very laggy

M

matc

macrumors member
Original poster
Sep 26, 2008
70
76
Hi Folks,

I am a bit dissappointed regarding the new iOS 5 AirPlay Feature for Games. Both my iPhone 4s and iPad 2 have serious problems streaming Real Racing HD to the Apple TV. It basically works but is due to a very laggy performance unplayable. The screen sometimes freezes for seconds.

My setup includes a Time Capsule connected to a Router. All iOS devices including the Apple TV are connected to the TC WiFi (802.11n). Streaming iTunes content works just fine and all iOS devices have a good internet connection in general.

Any idea how to solve this?

Thanks,
matc
 
matc said:
Hi Folks,

I am a bit dissappointed regarding the new iOS 5 AirPlay Feature for Games. Both my iPhone 4s and iPad 2 have serious problems streaming Real Racing HD to the Apple TV. It basically works but is due to a very laggy performance unplayable. The screen sometimes freezes for seconds.

My setup includes a Time Capsule connected to a Router. All iOS devices including the Apple TV are connected to the TC WiFi (802.11n). Streaming iTunes content works just fine and all iOS devices have a good internet connection in general.

Any idea how to solve this?

Thanks,
matc
Click to expand...

Mirrorin is not even close to being perfect there will always be latency issues while mirroring, you can possibly eliminate some of the lag though by hardwiring everything directly into your router
 
matc said:
Hi Folks,

I am a bit dissappointed regarding the new iOS 5 AirPlay Feature for Games. Both my iPhone 4s and iPad 2 have serious problems streaming Real Racing HD to the Apple TV. It basically works but is due to a very laggy performance unplayable. The screen sometimes freezes for seconds.

My setup includes a Time Capsule connected to a Router. All iOS devices including the Apple TV are connected to the TC WiFi (802.11n). Streaming iTunes content works just fine and all iOS devices have a good internet connection in general.

Any idea how to solve this?

Thanks,
matc
Click to expand...

Yep. I was severly disappointed as well. I couldn't even get an image to show up via AirPlay and I would get sound every couple of seconds. It blows. Only way to play it on the big screen tv is via the HDMI cable method. STILL!
 
Yes, same experience here. This gaming feature is nice on paper but useless in practice.
 
If only Apple let you download and run a version of an game on the AppleTV itself. I'm not talking about a complete app store... though that would also be nice... but just a temporary copy transfered from the iDevice. A bit like how card/UMD-free multiplayer works on the DS and PSP.
 
Went over to my friend's house the other day and happened to have my iPad with me so I we tried the multiplayer set up streaming to his ATV2. It seemed to work beautifully with no noticable lag even with 2 iPads airplaying to the ATV2. Made me want to get an ATV2.
 
b-rad g said:
Went over to my friend's house the other day and happened to have my iPad with me so I we tried the multiplayer set up streaming to his ATV2. It seemed to work beautifully with no noticable lag even with 2 iPads airplaying to the ATV2. Made me want to get an ATV2.
Click to expand...

I am curious, do you know exactly what router your friend has and how far it was from the :apple:TV and iPad? Oh, and was the :apple:TV using wireless or was it wired?
 
Last edited:
APlotdevice said:
I am curious, do you know exactly what router your friend has and how far it was from the :apple:TV and iPad? Oh, and was the :apple:TV using wireless or was it wired?
Click to expand...

He has a brand new Netgear router, not sure the model but it is dual band. The router is probably less then 10' from the ATV2 and the iPads are in the same room so prob less then 20'. Everything is hooked up wirelessly.
 
I have 2 apple tv one wired one using wifi... The one that is wired i get no lag at all, the one using wifi is lagging but that is because the apple tv is a little far from the router, if get closer to the router with my 4s i don't get any lag at all.
 
I have also had the lag when playing. When I have the apple tv hooked either wired or wireless, the game would lag quite a bit and sometimes stop. I'm currently using a Linksys WRT160n. I just picked a Netgear N900 router last night since my old router was dropping wireless connections lately. I'll post my findings later after I set it up.

Update:

Installed new router this morning. Airplay is still laggy. At least my range has improved.
 
Last edited:
I've only played one game with Airplay output; Cromag Rally. It looks ok onscreen, but I found myself 'dove-tailing' all over the place as my inputs were a fraction of a second too late all the time. If I played by looking at the iPad screen instead, I immediately drove much better.

There probably are lots of game types that wouldn't be affected, racing games are likely to be among the worst.

(I also tried turning on the iOS Airplay mirroring, and playing some games, like Death Rally. In that case, the lag wasn't as evident because the performance of the game slowed to a crawl - on both the iPad 2's screen and the TV).

In my case, the AppleTV is wired, and the router, TV, and iPad are all within about 3 metres of each other, so distance isn't the cause of the lag. It is a G router, rather than N; do N routers actually improve latency? Or just bandwidth?
 
We have Fiber-To-The-Home with our ISP. Would that make any difference?
 
Honestly, I don't think so. I have the same thing. We have fiber optics directly into our house when then switches over to copper (unfortunately but have not choice) and we even get 38Mbps. We have two Time Capsules (one is an extension of the other's wireless network). One of them is 3 generations ago which extends the 1st generation TimeCapsule. Ours is no more than 20' from our AppleTV and the AppleTV is wireless and we have really bad lag on ours. Not even a basic cocos2D game would run smoothly.

Don't know how to improve upon our connection with AppleTV (we should try making it wired). But if anyone can help me out with some other ideas with improving Airplay (as music works great, same with movies besides a few frames drop) would be great. Thanks!

b-rad g said:
We have Fiber-To-The-Home with our ISP. Would that make any difference?
Click to expand...
 
I found the solution to this on my D-Link N series router. Dig through the advanced network settings and turn on the "multicasting" function. It may be called different things, but has to do with multiple data streams at once. It completely fixed the lag problem in Air Play for me. Real Racing 2 is now reasonably playable in mirrored mode, and playing a video over AirPlay only takes a little bit of prebuffering now, instead of an insanely long time.
 
ATV2 and iPad3

redman042 said:
I found the solution to this on my D-Link N series router. Dig through the advanced network settings and turn on the "multicasting" function. It may be called different things, but has to do with multiple data streams at once. It completely fixed the lag problem in Air Play for me. Real Racing 2 is now reasonably playable in mirrored mode, and playing a video over AirPlay only takes a little bit of prebuffering now, instead of an insanely long time.
Click to expand...

My New iPad has led me to the wonderful world of mirroring with an ATV2. Video and most everything else streams well, but Real Racing 2 HD has trouble keeping up. Maybe because it is sending 1080p to a 720p device? I have an 802.11G FIOS router, so that can't help the cause either. I'll call Verizon and see if I can access the settings per above.
 
I'm away from home and bought the new ATV. I went to my bro-in-law's to show him the AirPlay in action. Setup was painless. Everything was smooth and lag-free. Real Racing 2 was amazing. All this on a Wifi-G network. Some Netgear.
 
I tried it with my other ATV2, this one connected to a smaller, newer, and 1080p HDTV. Much less lag (actually almost none)... BUT I was also closer to the router. The world is lucky I'm not a scientist.
 
I am having an interesting issue with mirroring games as well. I can mirror to the atv2 from my ipad2 and that works fine. games that support the mirroring however do not seem to recognize that. I can see the game but the extra mirroring effects (720p, different onscreen controls). aren't turning on. I am using a jailbroken iPad 2 at 5.0.1 and an atv2 that is up to date with apple's software. any ideas?
 
We just bought an ATV3 and one of the first things I did was test Real Racing 2's AirPlay mirroring feature via. my iPhone 4S.

The control lag makes the game completely unplayable.

Very disappointed.
 
King Mustard said:
We just bought an ATV3 and one of the first things I did was test Real Racing 2's AirPlay mirroring feature via. my iPhone 4S.

The control lag makes the game completely unplayable.

Very disappointed.
Click to expand...

If you turn on the Wifi Personal Hotspot on your 4S, can you connect the ATV to the 4S? I'd be very curious if - in this setup - Airplay works, and latency is improved.
 
Exact same issue with the ATV3 I bought today as well! Sound drops, lag and generally unplayable with a Netgear WNDR 3700 in 5ghz mode.
 
what kind of wifi signal do those of you having lag issues have? is the signal on both the ipad and apple tv decent? or are you far away from the router. Especially when using the 5ghz frequency if you are a ways away from the router you will notice speed drop offs. May also be good to check channel congestion to see if the default channels your router is using are being used by neighbors.
 
swordfish5736 said:
what kind of wifi signal do those of you having lag issues have? is the signal on both the ipad and apple tv decent? or are you far away from the router. Especially when using the 5ghz frequency if you are a ways away from the router you will notice speed drop offs. May also be good to check channel congestion to see if the default channels your router is using are being used by neighbors.
Click to expand...

I've tried with ATV3 wired and iphone 4s in a spot where i get 25-30Mbps download and ~15Mbps upload.
All games i've tried are unplayable.
 
Definitely seems like it's not a bandwidth issue, but a matter of router type, router settings, etc. Also try turning off bluetooth on your phone as this can interfere with Wifi.
 
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