Mirroring playback of 1080p MKV files smooth?

[raveelement]

I'm looking at replacing my wdtv box which has served me well for 4 years since it plays any file i throw at it with no hiccups. With that being said, the new apple tv looks enticing but the only thing keeping me from purchasing it is its ability to mirror hd content from my mac in good quality.

If i buy an apple tv it would be on the same ethernet network as my imac, i want to play a 1080p mkv movie on my imac and mirror the screen to apple tv. How is the quality? Is there any lag, is there any degration of quality at all?

Any help would be appreciated as I dont want to buy it and be disappointed and have to return it.

thx guys

 

[surfnode]

I'm looking at replacing my wdtv box which has served me well for 4 years since it plays any file i throw at it with no hiccups. With that being said, the new apple tv looks enticing but the only thing keeping me from purchasing it is its ability to mirror hd content from my mac in good quality.

If i buy an apple tv it would be on the same ethernet network as my imac, i want to play a 1080p mkv movie on my imac and mirror the screen to apple tv. How is the quality? Is there any lag, is there any degration of quality at all?

Any help would be appreciated as I dont want to buy it and be disappointed and have to return it.

thx guys

I'll let you know tomorrow as I'll be testing this.

 

[priitv8]

Why would you want to mirror in the first place? Why not just pump your movie stream into the aTV??
Mirroring always involves re-encoding into H.264 in realtime and it won't be as good as your offline compressed video stream. On most modern Mac-s and iDevices this is handled by hardware encoder, so final quality depends on the sending device, not the receiving one.

 

[zhenya]

Don't use mirroring. Use an app like Air Video TV or Plex when it's released to transcode the video on the fly and play it back natively. that will work perfectly. Mirroring will always be reduced quality and subject to lag and stuttering.

 

[niteflyr]

Don't use mirroring. Use an app like Air Video TV or Plex when it's released to transcode the video on the fly and play it back natively. that will work perfectly. Mirroring will always be reduced quality and subject to lag and stuttering.

or Beamer