Can I watch a movie on my HDTV played from my laptop?

ralphgmr · Jan 26, 2015

It seems like it's IMPOSSIBLE. I don't have words to say how frustrated I am to have this set. I just bought a HDTV so I will not watch my movies on the laptop anymore. I thought it would be something very straight forward to have everything configured. How was I mistaken.

I have a Macbook Air from the late 2011. I bought a common thunderbolt adapter to HDMI and the cable from the first store I found selling this kind of accessories. I got home and plugged everything and then... Nothing happens. Some research on google and I found out I was not the only one with the same issue. It was recommended I would get the "apple certified" Moshi adapter. 50 bucks. I thought, Ok, it's not cheap but it will solve my problem. Got home, plugged the whole thing and then... Nothing happens. I was already very upset at this point. I spent another day without being able to watch anything. So I got back to the apple store the next day and told them it was not working. The guy helping me out was clueless. I was already very impatient and thought I will get the Apple TV because that cannot go wrong. How was I mistaken. Got home. Plugged everything... And it works... Kind of. I tried turning my Airplay and played with VLC a movie I had on my hard disk. It started well but my happiness didn't hold for long. I started to have lots of lags on image and sound and my joy started to fade. Again, I googled the issue and NOT for my surprise, lots of people had the same issue, AGAIN. Lots of suggestions were made and I found one link ( http://support.apple.com/en-sg/TS4215) It is recommended to bring the router to the same room where the laptop and TV were. I just did that. For my surprise or maybe not, the lag became waaaay worse and the signal between apple tv and router became even worse (how is this even possible?!?! before on the settings / network were showing four small filled circles. Now shows only 2).

Tomorrow (and another day will pass), I will go to a store to buy a ethernet cable to plug router to apple TV directly and see what happens. If that doesn't work, can anyone recommend me a store which they still sell old VHS players? Thanks!!!!

P.S.: if anyone can give me any help before I throw this in the garbage can, that would be awesome. Thanks!

priitv8 · Jan 26, 2015

Dunno what's wrong with your Mac's display port (Did you check the Displays settings in System Preferences, that Mac output matches your TV's abilities?).
You should now be able to connect MacBook and :apple:

TV also directly, without wireless access point.
And last, but not least, why watch movies via AirPlay Mirroring, when simple AirPlay will do (if it's in :apple:

TV compatible format) or Beamer it (if it's not)?

kaldezar · Jan 26, 2015

ralphgmr said:
It seems like it's IMPOSSIBLE. I don't have words to say how frustrated I am to have this set. I just bought a HDTV so I will not watch my movies on the laptop anymore. I thought it would be something very straight forward to have everything configured. How was I mistaken.

I have a Macbook Air from the late 2011. I bought a common thunderbolt adapter to HDMI and the cable from the first store I found selling this kind of accessories. I got home and plugged everything and then... Nothing happens. Some research on google and I found out I was not the only one with the same issue. It was recommended I would get the "apple certified" Moshi adapter. 50 bucks. I thought, Ok, it's not cheap but it will solve my problem. Got home, plugged the whole thing and then... Nothing happens. I was already very upset at this point. I spent another day without being able to watch anything. So I got back to the apple store the next day and told them it was not working. The guy helping me out was clueless. I was already very impatient and thought I will get the Apple TV because that cannot go wrong. How was I mistaken. Got home. Plugged everything... And it works... Kind of. I tried turning my Airplay and played with VLC a movie I had on my hard disk. It started well but my happiness didn't hold for long. I started to have lots of lags on image and sound and my joy started to fade. Again, I googled the issue and NOT for my surprise, lots of people had the same issue, AGAIN. Lots of suggestions were made and I found one link ( http://support.apple.com/en-sg/TS4215) It is recommended to bring the router to the same room where the laptop and TV were. I just did that. For my surprise or maybe not, the lag became waaaay worse and the signal between apple tv and router became even worse (how is this even possible?!?! before on the settings / network were showing four small filled circles. Now shows only 2).

Tomorrow (and another day will pass), I will go to a store to buy a ethernet cable to plug router to apple TV directly and see what happens. If that doesn't work, can anyone recommend me a store which they still sell old VHS players? Thanks!!!!

P.S.: if anyone can give me any help before I throw this in the garbage can, that would be awesome. Thanks!

I would second the first replier check the display settings in system preferences, you don't need the expensive moshi cable, amazon do the self same cable at half the price which works beautifully with my 2010 Macbook Air and Panasonic 55" HD tv. AirPlay works flawlessly too! Hope this helps....

takeshi74 · Jan 26, 2015

+1 on checking settings before you blame the adapters. I've been using a Monorprice adapter without problems for years. However, display settings need to be correct.

ralphgmr · Jan 26, 2015

I checked the settings. The laptop behaves like there is absolutely nothing connected to it. It doesn't show any settings for configuration of a second monitor or Tv whatsoever. I tried even switching between HDMI slots to see if a slot might have a problem. nothing there either.

What is the difference between AirPlay and Airplay mirroring? I thought AirPlay is the mirroring?? Or does that mean throw/convert every movie I have on Itunes?

rwdds · Jan 26, 2015

I have a 2011 MBP I use as the main controller for a large HDTV display for my small vocational school. We use a DVI adapter to interface directly to the back of the TV. Display preferences allow us to set the resolution on the big screen. It has never failed to work.

Perhaps the display port output is faulty?

blueroom · Jan 26, 2015

Convert your movies to H.264 using Handbrake's ATV3 setting if you want it to work. You don't AirPlay but instead add the movies to iTunes and setup Home Sharing.

Tip, use wired Ethernet on the ATV3 to your router if you can.

Works great.

ralphgmr · Jan 26, 2015

blueroom said:
Convert your movies to H.264 using Handbrake's ATV3 setting if you want it to work. You don't AirPlay but instead add the movies to iTunes and setup Home Sharing.

Tip, use wired Ethernet on the ATV3 to your router if you can.

Works great.

Thanks for the tip, but this would be a lot of work to do and too much hassle, not to mention the amount of hard disk space that I will need. Imagine every movie I download, I have to wait already for the download to finish, then transcode and move to the iTunes? I want to download and play it, that's it. It would be even better if I didn't need to finish the download of the torrent but just stream it as downloads.

Not to mention that iTunes is probably the most annoying app ever. If I can keep away from it, I will.

priitv8 · Jan 26, 2015

ralphgmr said:
What is the difference between AirPlay and Airplay mirroring? I thought AirPlay is the mirroring?? Or does that mean throw/convert every movie I have on Itunes?

AirPlay = stream copy over network. Every Mac is able to do that, as bitrates remain usually low.
AP Mirroring - the full bitmap of your screen (aka framebuffer) will be re-encoded into H.264 on the fly and copied to network as in previous method. As Apple prefers to do the A/V encoding in hardware, this requires a new Intel iCPU. As you can imagine, this requires first decoding the movie from original format into framebuffer and re-encoding it from there.

PS If you don't see the display/TV in your System Info, then there must be a problem with either your laptop, TV's HDMI port, cable or adapter.

ralphgmr · Jan 26, 2015

priitv8 said:
AirPlay = stream copy over network. Every Mac is able to do that, as bitrates remain usually low.
AP Mirroring - the full bitmap of your screen (aka framebuffer) will be re-encoded into H.264 on the fly and copied to network as in previous method. As Apple prefers to do the A/V encoding in hardware, this requires a new Intel iCPU. As you can imagine, this requires first decoding the movie from original format into framebuffer and re-encoding it from there.

PS If you don't see the display/TV in your System Info, then there must be a problem with either your laptop, TV's HDMI port, cable or adapter.

Ok, now it makes sense why so much lag if the mirroring needs encoding on the fly.

But how to play without mirroring (Airplay stream copy over network)? Through iTunes? Or is there other options?

thekayman · Jan 27, 2015

Apple works best with Apple stuff and Apple standards.

For what you're trying to do, return the aTV, get a WDTV instead and be done with it.

A7ibaba · Jan 27, 2015

Buy AirPort Express,connect it to router with ethernet and set up in client mode. In AP set 5Ghz network and connect macbook and Apple tv to 5ghz network. That will eliminate all interferance and you will have 300 mbps bit rate communication between mac and appletv

priitv8 · Jan 27, 2015

ralphgmr said:
But how to play without mirroring (Airplay stream copy over network)? Through iTunes? Or is there other options?

iTunes is the most straightforward.
And then there is Beamer (I linked to their www in my earlier post).
Assuming the video stream is in AVC/H.264, then it will just repack the stream (without re-encoding). Thus you get the freedom to use other container formats (MKV, TS etc).
It also knows how to re-encode DTS into AC3 on the fly (audio encode is much cheaper, than video).
If your stream isn in anything other than AVC (video) and AAC/AC3 (audio/surround audio) then Subler will fall back to re-encoding (using the FFMPEG library).

A7ibaba said:
Buy AirPort Express,connect it to router with ethernet and set up in client mode. In AP set 5Ghz network and connect macbook and Apple tv to 5ghz network. That will eliminate all interferance and you will have 300 mbps bit rate communication between mac and appletv

You don't need to do this anymore, as latest aTV

apple:TV 3 Rev 2 is able to make a P2P connection directly to a Mac, without a wireless access point.

McScooby · Jan 27, 2015

if u have a ethernet adapter for mb air, plug air into Atv, sorted & think about it another day!

gpspad · Jan 28, 2015

I'd like to test streaming from my macbook to my apple tv w/o the wireless connection. Any ideas on how you of this?

i.e.. what settings do you use?

zeryus · Jan 29, 2015

For playing "not itunes" compatible movies using Airplay/ATV, I use Air Video HD from InMethod. No need for itunes at all.

McScooby · Jan 30, 2015

gpspad said:
I'd like to test streaming from my macbook to my apple tv w/o the wireless connection. Any ideas on how you of this?

i.e.. what settings do you use?

if u mean without being connected to a common wi-fi network, think u just turn bluetooth on, on the computer & it finds the ATV, sadly I've a 1080 ATV, but not one of the newer ones so can't check, hence how i came about running a ethernet cable in, since I like the ATV menu better than direct conn from MB.

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