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Airplay Stuttering - upgrade to cMBP?

H

hypno

macrumors regular
Original poster
Oct 30, 2012
181
1
I upgraded from my 2009 macbook to a 2012 MBA 13" (i5 processor) over the weekend with a big motivator being the Airplay mirroring functionality. I'm pretty disappointed to say the least, and I'm wondering if I should consider the upgrade to the cMBP since it's the same price. It seems others have had Airplay stuttering problems with 2012 MBA on the forums, but can't seem to find any with resolution. Before you jump on me for wifi setup:

SETUP: I have dual band Asus RT-N66U (consistently named with the best available routers) with my Apple TV wired directly and my MBA 10 ft away with zero obstructions connecting to the 5GHZ band. iStumbler shows anywhere from 58 - 75% signal depending on where I'm at in the room and 13% noise (sometimes 18%). Watching any type of sport is unwatchable as it's losing frames fairly regularly which is annoying when a player is running.

So here's my options:

1. Could there be a problem with my MBA? Doesn't seem likely based on others with 2012 having the same problem, but I love the smaller form factor of the MBA since I travel a lot. I'd prefer this form factor first, but exchanging seems silly as I doubt it's a wireless adpater problem.

2. Given my network setup is optimum one more choice would be to buy the thunderbolt to ethernet adapter to remove ALL wireless from the equation as a test to see if the MBA just can't keep up CPU wise. This would be pure troubleshooting because I'm not sure what's the point of Airplay feature if it doesn't work right.

3. If it's a known that the MBA can't keep up, is anyone here with a 2012 cMBP having success? I'm curious if a dual core i5 with 2.5ghz might take some of the edge off of the stutter over my current dual core i5 1.8ghz. Also, easier option to upgrade the cMBP to 8 + GB RAM.

----------

I should also add that if I absolutely had to, I could swing the $300 more for an i7 2.9ghz cMBP if that's what got me over the Airplay Mirroring hurdle, but I suppose I'd like to think that the i5 works or else they wouldn't include it? (hah)
 
hypno said:
I upgraded from my 2009 macbook to a 2012 MBA 13" (i5 processor) over the weekend with a big motivator being the Airplay mirroring functionality. I'm pretty disappointed to say the least, and I'm wondering if I should consider the upgrade to the cMBP since it's the same price. It seems others have had Airplay stuttering problems with 2012 MBA on the forums, but can't seem to find any with resolution. Before you jump on me for wifi setup:

SETUP: I have dual band Asus RT-N66U (consistently named with the best available routers) with my Apple TV wired directly and my MBA 10 ft away with zero obstructions connecting to the 5GHZ band. iStumbler shows anywhere from 58 - 75% signal depending on where I'm at in the room and 13% noise (sometimes 18%). Watching any type of sport is unwatchable as it's losing frames fairly regularly which is annoying when a player is running.

So here's my options:

1. Could there be a problem with my MBA? Doesn't seem likely based on others with 2012 having the same problem, but I love the smaller form factor of the MBA since I travel a lot. I'd prefer this form factor first, but exchanging seems silly as I doubt it's a wireless adpater problem.

2. Given my network setup is optimum one more choice would be to buy the thunderbolt to ethernet adapter to remove ALL wireless from the equation as a test to see if the MBA just can't keep up CPU wise. This would be pure troubleshooting because I'm not sure what's the point of Airplay feature if it doesn't work right.

3. If it's a known that the MBA can't keep up, is anyone here with a 2012 cMBP having success? I'm curious if a dual core i5 with 2.5ghz might take some of the edge off of the stutter over my current dual core i5 1.8ghz. Also, easier option to upgrade the cMBP to 8 + GB RAM.

----------

I should also add that if I absolutely had to, I could swing the $300 more for an i7 2.9ghz cMBP if that's what got me over the Airplay Mirroring hurdle, but I suppose I'd like to think that the i5 works or else they wouldn't include it? (hah)
Click to expand...

Airplay stutters sometimes with my rMBP....its not the computer...its Airplay.
 
It's probably a minor network issue. I can stream AirPlay to my ATV from my iPhone 4S with no problems.
 
Mrbobb said:
Did you configure QOS?
Click to expand...

Yup. But I also took everything off the network except the MBA and ATV3 and still had issues, so not like QOS had any competing traffic to prioritize at that point.

Sounds like I will sit this out for awhile if people are still getting stuttering over ethernet with the MBP too. No sense in hardwiring the MBA or a cMBP when I can just do that with the 2009 Macbook.
 
I had this same problem with rMBP, apple TV 3, and RT-N66U router, and for me the solution was to use wifi instead of the ethernet connection from the ATV to the router. As soon as I switched from wired to wireless, I was able to stream 1080p flawlessly without a single stutter using airplay from my rMBP. I am not a computer guru by any means, so maybe this is obvious (or wrong), but my understanding is that the dual-band wifi provides more bandwidth than the 10/100 ethernet on the ATV.

I also found this to be true when I used an old apple usb ethernet adapter to connect to my NAS. I thought it would be faster than wifi, but it turned out to be a slower, I believe, due to the same 10/100 constraint (of the USB adapter).

Just thought this might be of help for anyone else dealing with airplay stuttering or jerkiness with the ATV3.
 
same issue with me.

i have 2013 mba haswell. and i stream spotify to apple tv with airplay. but it stutters.

when i steram spotify from my ipad mini it s flawless

i think we need an update for mba :(

or is the problem with wifi? i wish so..
 
I suspect the issue may be multitasking on the Mac versus continuous resource availability with the iOS devices. A quad-core Mac may do AirPlay better than a dual-core Mac. If my guess is correct, shutting down other apps on the Mac should help -- especially apps like Mail and Safari that intermittently use CPU and network resources.
 
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