Until now. Luckily the hardware on my MacBook Pro supports Intel's Quick Sync technology, so with the recent release of OS X 10.8 it is able to do AirPlay Mirroring to an AppleTV. Which would be great... if I had an AppleTV (and I've almost considered buying one just for this). But given that I've already got a MacBook plugged into my A/V set-up it would be more convenient to use that.
I tried a couple of free AirPlay server applications on the MacBook (both AirPlayer and BananaTV allowed media to be sent from Caroline's iPhone to the TV (BananaTV worked better with audio)) but they didn't allow AirPlay Mirroring from my laptop. But when I downloaded the paid AirServer app I found that it did exactly what I wanted. I'm less than a day into the week long free trial, but unless I find some serious flaws I'll be purchasing it.
Update 2012-09-24: There was a security update for my MacBook, which required a restart, which ended my free trial. But I purchased AirServer, and am happy with it. There are some problems with video/audio synchronisation when sharing the screen from the MacBook Pro to the MacBook (I found that setting the Audio Buffer Size to 2200 seemed to give the best synchronisation), but the best solution for streaming video is to do it from iTunes, and then the video and audio stay in sync.
[*] My previous best solutions were just to use a cable (3.5mm for just audio, HDMI for video/audio), although for audio only setting up AU Lab 2.1 to send the System Audio (intercepted by SoundFlower) to another instance of AU Lab running on the target system worked with the lowest latency. Setting up a reverse VNC connection worked well enough to allow displaying of photos to the computer plugged into the TV, but both of these are a bit fiddly compared to just plugging a cable in, or the wireless simplicity of AirPlay.
5 comments:
Airplay mirroring is really useful. Does this mean you've got a shiny new MacBook Pro? I only got support for the live H.264 encoding stream because I bought another new MacBook Air this summer. I may have a problem.
I've got a 2nd generation Apple TV, and they're a super handy way to make Apple things display on a big TV without fussing with cables. Although if you've got a thunderbolt out , that will throw audio out, so you only need a MiniDP -> HDMI lead
hanging out your TV. The TV box is nifty though, and low power.
It has taken me nine attempts to get the captcha right for this comment :-/
Nice one Jim. Keep posting how this works. Sounds like we are circling around the same type of under-servered TV usecases. I used to run a PC server based PVR solution in a big house we lived in: server in the basement, 3 tuner cards, full ethernet wired infrastructure in the house and a Media Extender on each TV in the house (running SageTV). It was a fantastic solution. Now we are in a smaller house it more tempting to use a PC/mac directly on the TV. Currently we run TV directly on the cable though, and an old apple TV with XBMC on with our movie archive. XBMC rocks big time. Okay, now on for the bl.. captcha. Hate those things.
@beatworm - I got a shiny new 13" MacBook Pro a year ago, after I "accidentally" broke the keyboard on my MacBook (which is why it's now my PVR). I was lucky that my MBP was supported for AirPlay Mirroring when OS X 10.8 came out.
I used to use a ThunderBolt/HDMI adapter (plus a 5m HDMI cable) to put video and audio on to the TV, but AirPlay is much more convenient (and means I don't even have to switch the inputs on the TV).
@Mathias - I've been hooking my old laptops to the TV to act as a PVR for Freeview now for some time. But then we only have one TV, so it seemed to be the least complicated solution.
How did you get Mac to Mac working on airserverapp? I thought it only did iPad/iPhone to Mac.
My 10.8 MBP won't see airserver on my 10.6 mac mini, but the ipad and iphone will.
Have any tips? Thanks
@Marcos: I don't actually recall having to do anything special to get AirServer to work Mac to Mac. I just installed it on my MacBook that is plugged into the TV (running OS X 10.6.8), started it up and it showed up as an AirPlay receiver on my MacBook Pro (running OS X 10.8.2) in the AirPlay menu in the menu bar (select "Show mirroring options in the menu bar when available" in System Preferences > Displays) and also in iTunes.
If it shows up on iOS devices maybe you have some network setting (Firewall) that's stopping the MBP from seeing it properly.
Post a Comment