AirPlay Quality is Unbearable

[mlwrx]

Has anyone experienced terrible AirPlay quality? One of my hopes in getting the ATV 4K was the ability to AirPlay stuff from my MacBook Air to my ATV (e.g. streaming video of a football game to my actual TV). Unfortunately, the quality is terrible, and I spend most of my time watching a pixelated, skipping mess and just have to plug my computer to my TV via HDMI.

Do others experience similar issues?

 

[priitv8]

How do you airplay?
Despite same name, there are 2 findamentally different technologies at play.
Pure stream forwarding from the computer to aTV over the network and AirPlay mirroring.
In the latter case your CPU does encode the full framebuffer of your computer screen and also sends it to aTV over the network.
Depending on your MacBook AIr's performance, it may go well or not so.
At least a modern i5 or i7 is needed that has a hardware H.264 encoder onboard.

 

[mpainesyd]

What sort of video are you playing from the Mac? If they are media files on your Mac you can use Homesharing & iTunes on the Mac to play these media directly from the ATV, via the Computers app on the ATV.
If you are playing Youtube video you could also play this directly from the ATV via the Youtube app

 

[mmomega]

that wifi network or the file

So your wifi router / AP is sending and receiving at the exact same data rate twice. Example: 10MegaBytes per second being sent and 10 MegaBytes per second being received. Depending on things like bitrate, is it being streamed from the internet if so now the network is receiving, then sending and then receiving again. There are many variables.

The only way to test if it is the file, the network, or the devices is to hardwire and eliminate wifi as much as possible.

 

[mlwrx]

How do you airplay?
Despite same name, there are 2 findamentally different technologies at play.
Pure stream forwarding from the computer to aTV over the network and AirPlay mirroring.
In the latter case your CPU does encode the full framebuffer of your computer screen and also sends it to aTV over the network.
Depending on your MacBook AIr's performance, it may go well or not so.
At least a modern i5 or i7 is needed that has a hardware H.264 encoder onboard.

Thanks for your reply. Previously, when trying to AirPlay, I would open the streaming website of my choice and then choose the AirPlay option from the action bar at the top of the screen. This is what resulted in pool quality.
[doublepost=1534378296][/doublepost]

What sort of video are you playing from the Mac? If they are media files on your Mac you can use Homesharing & iTunes on the Mac to play these media directly from the ATV, via the Computers app on the ATV.
If you are playing Youtube video you could also play this directly from the ATV via the Youtube app

Typically, I will stream content such as out of network football games.

 

[priitv8]

Thanks for your reply. Previously, when trying to AirPlay, I would open the streaming website of my choice and then choose the AirPlay option from the action bar at the top of the screen. This is what resulted in pool quality.

Unless you use the AirPlay icon in the web-player to re-route the stream to appleTV, you are mirroring. Mirroring means uncompressing the incoming stream, displaying it on Mac screen, recompressing the screen content in real time and sending it out to appleTV.

 

[cynics]

What year and specs is your MacBook Air? Its likely struggling decoding and then transcoding the stream for the AppleTV (artifacts). And/or there are network bottlenecks somewhere along the line (stuttering/lag).

Like mentioned by @priitv8 you'll get much better quality and reliability if you AirPlay directly from the web sites video player using the AirPlay icon found on it or right clicking it. By doing so you are essentially telling the AppleTV to play from the source and not go through your MacBook Air (you will still have control of playback from the MacBook). Caveat is this only works with HTML5 video but that is very common. Furthermore specific browsers will support specific video/audio codec for example Safari doesn't support WebM/VP9/etc although that is a moot point because the video wouldn't play at all for you.

If for reason the web player isn't HTML5 you can try extending the display. For me it helped with an older Mac I had but only very slightly. Kind of a last ditch effort.