Airplay Glitch Nightmare

[JES]

Hi All,

Help!

VLC used to stream fine via airplay to our Apple TV, but it no longer does. Audio is fine but the video is unwatchably jumpy. Also YouTube and other streaming sites suck. Playing stuff off the Netflix app on the Apple TV works fine. It's only streaming from the computer. Here's all the relevant information I can think to provide:

Apple TV 3rd Gen, says OS is up to date
Macbook Air running OSX 10.10.5
Latest version of VLC, tried different videos, no love no matter what we are using.

Network:

Airport Extreme in office, with Airport Express as booster in living room. Wireless options set to 802.11a/n -- 802.11 b/g/n (automatic). Oldest device on our network is an iPhone 4. Airport express says network connection is "excellent."

The network is secure and nobody else is using it.

Download speed (shouldn't be relevant for streaming from laptop) is 31.52mbps.

Older threads suggest turning off WMM QoS, but that doesn't seem to apply to Apple products.

TIA.

 

[waw74]

Airplay mirroring is never really a good option for video.
Because of the way it works, your mac plays the file to your monitor, and then it takes the image off your screen, re-encodes it and sends that to your aTV. It gets no chance to read-ahead on the file, as it has to wait till the image is on your screen before it can be compressed and sent off to the aTV.

--An app such as beamer will send to file directly to the aTV instead of converting it to a visible image first.

--For youtube, if you're using safari, use the airplay icon at the bottom of the video in the browser, that will send the stream directly to the aTV, you can use this for other web videos too, but may not be available depending on how the site encodes it's videos.

-- the "booster" airport express, will can cut your available wireless bandwidth. As the repeater has to use it's wireless hardware talk to both the main router and your wireless device at the same time, if you can hardwire (powerline networking also works) the repeater, it will let the repeater use it's full wireless bandwidth to talk to your devices.

--if both your aTV and the laptop are wireless, it will use a lot more of the available bandwidth. As the stream has to go back to the router before it goes to the aTV, so it's on the network twice, wiring one of the devices can fix that.

 

[JES]

Thanks for the reply Waw74. We tried Beamer, which improved things but it's still not all that great. Then I just unplugged the Airport express, which made things worse again. So I don't think that's the cause.

I'm just so confused because it worked fine, without a problem, for years. It's like Apple updated something and made it crappy.

There's always just plugging an HDMI into the computer and not streaming wirelessly, but the whole point of the Apple TV was to be able to stream wirelessly. . . .which it used to be able to do.