AirPlay quality not great

[gigatoaster]

Hello there

I have an Apple TV 4K connected to a Panasonic OLED TV. I like to show pictures I took from my iPhone 11 Pro to my guests on the TV. I just use screen mirroring, which I believe is what we call AirPlay.

However, on the photos I see artefacts and pixels. And it’s lagging. What could be the issue? Is it related to my wifi?

Any suggestions on things I could do to fix the issue?

 

[0128672]

Airplay and screen mirroring are different. For Airplay you choose the content you want to stream to your Airplay-compatible TV or Apple TV, and then tap the Airplay icon or select it from the more menu. For screen mirroring, you select it from the Control Center and whatever you're doing on your device is displayed on the screen. For some content you can use both options, but it's possible there may be a quality difference of one over the other.

Use AirPlay to stream video or mirror the screen of your iPhone or iPad - Apple Support

Use AirPlay to stream or share content from your Apple devices to your Apple TV, AirPlay-compatible smart TV, or Mac. Stream a video. Share your photos. Or mirror exactly what's on your device's screen.

support.apple.com

There's some other info in this Apple Discussion thread from 2017 that may be helpful too:

my airplay mirroring is choppy - Apple Community

discussions.apple.com

 

[priitv8]

They both use same name - AirPlay - but the principles behind are totally different.
When you do screen mirroring, the iPhone has to work really hard, because it must video-encode your screen contents in realtime, on the fly. There is hardware onboard for that, but still - it is a video encode process.
Of course, apple made things smarter over time. For example, if you start with Screen mirroring but try to display a network stream (say play YouTube or iTunes video etc), then it simply hands the stream over to appleTV and does not do additional real-time re-encoding - it steps out from being a middleman.

 

[waw74]

on photos, when you select the share button, there's an airplay option.

That will give you much better quality on the TV, You can still zoom, scroll around the image and swipe through photo, and the image on the TV will match your phone. It only displays selected photos, so you can back out of the photo on your phone to the grid, and scroll to select another pic. The TV will only show the photos on the TV (and not the grid), it will hold the first one, until you select the next one.

I believe this actually sends the photo the aTV, and then just commands for the zoom/scroll commands, so they match.


screen mirroring uses the other kind of airplay, where the output going to your phone's screen from the "video card" on your phone is re-encoded, and sent to the aTV, it sacrifices quality for speed, so the displays stay in sync as much as possible. It also requires a fast and stable network connection between the 2 devices. Because they try to keep the screens in sync, you're limited to the real-time bandwidth between the 2 devices, since there's no way to buffer ahead, since it's coming off a live image.

 

[w5jck]

A lot depends on the color space used by the photo. Apple tends to use Display P3 which can display more colors than sRGB. If you use Display P3 within the photo, but don't embed the Display P3 colors within the photo, they will look good on yout iPhone but might look bad on another device. Also, it depends on whether your are looking at an 8-bit JPEG or a 16-bit PNG or RAW file. A 4K TV might be capable of displaying 10-bit or even 12-bit color, but a JPEG photo will have only 8-bit color, so you will likely see incorrect colors, banding, artifacts, etc. Try saving your photos in the Display P3 color space and at 16-bit quality PNG. Almost any good image processor can do that. Just open your iPhone photo in the image processor, verify it is 16-bit, set color space to Display P3, make any edits you want to, then save as a 16-bit PNG with Display P3 embedded. That iPhone photo will now look like what you see on your iPhone when viewed on TVs or other devices.

Unfortunately, Apple has never truly understood or cared about photo formats. They seem to only care about what it looks like on their devices. So you have to take the bull by the horns and ensure those photos will look their best on other devices.

 

[Jus711]

If you have an  TV and an iPhone then just use the photos app on the  tv, it will be your same library on your phone but displayed natively if you're signed in to your account and you won't have to worry about screen mirroring or Airplay

 

[w5jck]

Another tip is to create a Photo album to share on the Apple TV. You can create a photo album, then with iCloud connect it to the ATV and set the screensaver options in your ATV to display that photo album. Again, make sure you are using 16-bit files with Display P3 color space. Remember, crap in, crap out. So don't use 8-bit JPEGs in the album.

 

[LMC91]

on photos, when you select the share button, there's an airplay option.

That will give you much better quality on the TV, You can still zoom, scroll around the image and swipe through photo, and the image on the TV will match your phone. It only displays selected photos, so you can back out of the photo on your phone to the grid, and scroll to select another pic. The TV will only show the photos on the TV (and not the grid), it will hold the first one, until you select the next one.

I believe this actually sends the photo the aTV, and then just commands for the zoom/scroll commands, so they match.


screen mirroring uses the other kind of airplay, where the output going to your phone's screen from the "video card" on your phone is re-encoded, and sent to the aTV, it sacrifices quality for speed, so the displays stay in sync as much as possible. It also requires a fast and stable network connection between the 2 devices. Because they try to keep the screens in sync, you're limited to the real-time bandwidth between the 2 devices, since there's no way to buffer ahead, since it's coming off a live image.

When I first got my Airplay enabled TV I did it the Airplay way using Share and forgot about it, and ever since was doing it through Screen Mirroring, but was never happy with the lag and stuttering. That seems to be working better for me already after just a quick test! Thank you very much!