iPhone Presentations via an ATV4

[getrealbro]

The plan was to go to a meeting and Airplay a Keynote presentation from an iPhone to an ATV4 attached to a video projector via an HDMI cable. It worked. But two ATV4 limitations made the process a little cumbersome.

1 - The Apple TV4 won’t directly connect to an iPhone running as a hot spot. Which meant that I needed a separate router to establish a wireless network to connect the iPhone to the ATV4.

2 - The Apple TV4 can only remember the password of ONE wireless network. So I got to use the ATV4’s hardware remote to enter at least one network password.

Here’s what I did….
1 - I used a old Airport Express to establish a “presentation” network with no password.
2 - Before unplugging everything, I switched the ATV4 and iPhone to the “presentation” network.
3 - At the meeting I plugged in the Airport, then the ATV4 and set the iPhone to mirror to the ATV4.
4 - I switched the iPhone to AirPlay Mirroring before I switched the projector to the HDMI input. Note this was not strictly necessary but it hid the iPhone’s UI from the audience.
5- Back home I switched the ATV4 back to our wireless network and entered the password via the hardware remote.

Apparently Apple never considered that an ATV4 would be used at multiple locations or that one might want to AirPlay to an Apple TV4 using only an iOS device and an ATV4.

—GetRealBro

 

[Rigby]

You should be able to use peer-to-peer Airplay, which requires neither any pre-established Wifi network nor using the phone as a hotspot. It sets up a peer-to-peer Wifi connection between the devices automatically. Just make sure that Bluetooth is enabled on both the ATV and the iOS device or Mac, since that is used for the initial device discovery and key exchange.

 

[getrealbro]

You should be able to use peer-to-peer Airplay,....

Thanks for the tip. I gave it a try and it handled my small presentation, which includes several embedded videos, pretty well.

The only glitch was when I first hit the “play” button in Keynote the AppleTV screen went completely black. This happened several more times. So I tried some other apps. When I went back to Keynotem it displayed the presentation just fine.

I’ll have a chance to try this again in a few days where I won’t have any WiFi. I’ll report back how that goes.

FWIW I left my iPhone 6s connected to our home network the whole time. All I did to the Apple T4 was tell it to forget our home network before I set up AirPlay Mirroring from the 6s.

—GetRealBro