hesitations while streaming music with airplay from macbook air to apple tv

What's your router? Have you set up the channel to minimize interference from neighbor's wifi stations?

One Airport Extreme station works great in my 3 floor place. Streams videos fine to AppleTV too.

@kanoute

Short: Yes

Long: Regardless of how well your HiFi system is setup, you are going to experience a loss, both time and quality related,when introducing WiFi into the system. The audio/video you are streaming from your MBA to your ATV is being transmitted like all data over the internet, in packets. A small sample of the media is packaged, sent to the router(Airport or not), routed to the apple T.v by I.P address, unpackaged and read/played. During this transmission is where you will see a slight lag in time as well as a decrease in sound quality, even though on most systems you wont be able to tell. All in all, that slight delay you are experiencing when clicking play on your MBA and actually hearing the media isn't going to go away anytime soon. I have a similar setup and even an Airport Express in the mix making it completely Apple products and i still have this same issue. To me, the wireless audio from Apple devices is worth the slight initial delay. Turn on a playlist or Pandora/Spotify and you will hardly notice it.

-KM3SK

audio airplay has a buffer built in, about 2 seconds, incase the signal gets delayed or interrupted your music won't skip.

it's normal, and has been doing this since the day of it being called airtunes.

iTunes will delay the graphics so that the interface matches up with what you're hearing.


video airplay is handled differently.

Why does the content being streamed go through the internet?? Why not just stream it from ones Mac or PC directly to the Apple TV like a bluetooth keyboard or mouse does between itself and your Mac?

bigpoppamac31 said:

Why does the content being streamed go through the internet?? Why not just stream it from ones Mac or PC directly to the Apple TV like a bluetooth keyboard or mouse does between itself and your Mac?

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it doesn't, it goes over your home network.

it does go through your router though. your wifi devices only talk to the router, not each other.

bigpoppamac31 said:

Why does the content being streamed go through the internet?? Why not just stream it from ones Mac or PC directly to the Apple TV like a bluetooth keyboard or mouse does between itself and your Mac?

Click to expand...

Airplay has an edge over Bluetooth.

1. Ethernet and wifi are the two ways to send the Airplay signal. These offer more bandwidth than the current versions of Bluetooth. There have been advances in Bluetooth, but it has remained behind wifi and Ethernet for several years. Remember Airplay has been around for quite a while.

2. The wider range of wifi. With wifi, you can set up a signal and expand it throughout your house and even to you backyard. If you have a multizone receiver, you can run speakers to your patio or to a separate room. From that area you can use a Airplay from 100 feet away if your wifi signal extends that far (you can also setup a repeater to expand coverage if needed). With Bluetooth, you are usually only able to control it from a nearby location.

3. Airplay is always on. What I mean by that is that when you start playing music on your iPhone, you will automatically see all Airplay devices on your network. With Bluetooth, you may have to go into settings to connect to the device. I have several Bluetooth speakers and the only device that automatically connects is my car. Apple could make it easier to get to the Bluetooth device selections, but it is currently buried in settings. iOS7 has added Siri control to get to Bluetooth settings, but it is still a few extra steps.

4. With Airplay, I can select my Denon receiver (that has Airplay built in)and it will turn it on and change the receiver's to the correct output signal and start playing automatically. I am not aware of a Bluetooth receiver that can do this.

The main upside to Bluetooth is that you don't need wifi or Ethernet for it to work. I would expect Apple to add more options for Bluetooth in newer AppleTVs for this reason, but I doubt that they would get rid of the flexibility that Airplay offers unless Bluetooth continues to make large strides.

KM3SK said:

Regardless of how well your HiFi system is setup, you are going to experience a loss, both time and quality related,when introducing WiFi into the system.

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I don't believe that it is true that there is a quality loss over Airplay; Mirroring, perhaps. The way Airplay works is to send the file to the aTV, where it is decoded and played. The aTV is playing what is essentially the original file, so there is no signal degradation due to WiFi.

slothrob said:

The way Airplay works is to send the file to the aTV, where it is decoded and played. The aTV is playing what is essentially the original file, so there is no signal degradation due to WiFi.

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video airplay yes.

audio only airplay uses the old airtunes system, which re-encodes to apple lossless, but wifi would only introduce pauses if there is not enough bandwidth not a poorer signal.

home sharing lets the aTV browse the iTunes library on your computer, and then plays the file locally on the aTV.

mirroring has has to encode and transmit the video and audio in near real time which is why the quality can be a bit lacking.