Disappointed in Mountain Lion Airplay Mirroring

Though I have the hardware to support Airplay mirroring, I haven't been too impressed by its performance. I don't believe I am doing anything wrong, but my experiences have not matched those of the early reviewers I have read.

First of all, there is noticeable lag. The iTunes visualizer struggles to produce fluid motion, and there is a half second delay in input from my trackpad. My network is wireless N and everything connected has full bars.

Perhaps more frustrating are my resolution issues. I am running an i5 mid 2011 mini and an ATV3. My monitor's native resolution is 1680x1050, and the TV I have the ATV hooked to is a 55" 1080p LED Samsung.

When I enable Airplay on the mini, I have the option to match the mini's resolution or the ATV's resolution, and there is also the scaling option. No permutation I have found will allow me to select 1080p, however. The most logical option, selecting the ATV resolution, seems even lower than my monitor's native resolution (720P? it does not specify). The only times I get specific output resolutions to choose from are when I select match monitor, but then it maxes out at 1680x1050. It seems my monitor is limiting what the mini can output to the ATV, but that doesn't make much sense to me, and I could swear I saw someone running 1080p from a macbook with a much lower native resolution than 1080P. And when I unplug the monitor it (literally) freaks out, flashes green garbled screen on the ATV until I plug it back in.

So two main issues I suppose. Any insight would be great. As I said I am a bit disappointed thus far, I thought I had everything I needed besides Mountain Lion to be able to cease moving my mini back and forth between my TV and monitor, but alas.

Thanks!

Could it have anything to do with not running iOS6 on the ATV?

otech said:

There is always going to be a lag with realtime transcoding - I dont think games or intensive graphics are an intended use case for Airplay Mirroring - at least with anything less than the latest quad core i7's.

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thomaspurchas said:

Oh finally because I'm having a go at otech, I feel I should point out to santos. that a half a second delay is pretty darn good when you consider the amount of work required to pull of Airplay mirroring, also its called mirroring, or Airplay display extension, you should be looking at yours mini's screen not your TV when using a mouse.

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I suppose I let the early reviews get my expectations up ("no lag!"), because from a technical standpoint I definitely agree that it seems like a difficult feat. Nothing will match plugging the mini directly to my TV. Shame.


The resolution, however, is something that seems fixable. In case it wasn't clear, I have the latest ATV, which is capable of 1080p. I have seen from numerous sources, even Apple themselves, that ML airplay should support 1080p streams.

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2012/07/25Mountain-Lion-Available-Today-From-the-Mac-App-Store.html said:

Airplay Mirroring, an easy way to wirelessly send an up-to-1080p secure stream of what’s on your Mac to an HDTV using Apple TV®

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It doesn't state it should be limited by the resolution of the monitor it is directly connected to, and I wouldn't have imagined that (despite the clarity issues you mention, otech) it wouldn't be able to figure something out, upscaling etc. And I am pretty sure I've seen laptops with lesser native resolutions outputting 1080p, but maybe I'm wrong. I will have to find a 1080p monitor to plug directly into and see what happens when I mirror that to my ATV3.

Thanks for the replies everyone.

I wish.

Airparrot looks nice, and seems to actually give the user some options rather than play the "too simple" game Apple does. How is the responsiveness? Any perceivable delay between trackad input and output? How about things like the iTunes visualizer?