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Why hasn't Apple introduced Airplay, not just Airplay mirroring?

I

icebergx

macrumors regular
Original poster
Hi all,
I know most people will probably not know the answer to this but I don't really understand why Airplay (video) hasn't been implemented in OSX yet.
I don't mean mirroring, and I know Airplay Audio is possible, but things like beaming a youtube video to your Apple TV, without having to fully mirror your display, sounds like a simple, useful, feature.
If you can do it with your iPhone, doing it with your Mac should be pretty simple, no?
 
icebergx said:
I don't mean mirroring, and I know Airplay Audio is possible, but things like beaming a youtube video to your Apple TV, without having to fully mirror your display, sounds like a simple, useful, feature.
If you can do it with your iPhone, doing it with your Mac should be pretty simple, no?
Click to expand...
Not sure what you are asking here. Airplay needs to be implemented in the playback application, since it requires access to the original video stream before decoding. iTunes can obviously airplay video. It would be easily possible to implement airplay for Youtube videos in a Youtube Mac app.
 
Rigby said:
Not sure what you are asking here. Airplay needs to be implemented in the playback application, since it requires access to the original video stream before decoding. iTunes can obviously airplay video. It would be easily possible to implement airplay for Youtube videos in a Youtube Mac app.
Click to expand...

Your youtube example is what I want. I'd like my Apple TV to be able access the original video stream.
I'd like to be able to beam the video stream, that I've come across on the internet (via Safari or Chrome) directly to my Apple TV. This can be down on the iPhone, so I don't know why this would be a problem for a full-sized Mac.

The reason why I want this is, that I often watch sports on my Mac, and when I airplay mirror my screen, panning shots and fast motion become almost unwatchable, even if I'm connected to the Apple TV via Ethernet. If I just watch the action on my mac screen, it looks perfect. Not jerkiness whatsoever.

Thanks.
 
icebergx said:
Your youtube example is what I want. I'd like my Apple TV to be able access the original video stream.
Click to expand...
Well, then you need to ask Google or a third-party developer to write a Mac app for Youtube that can airplay. This is not really Apple's responsibility.
I'd like to be able to beam the video stream, that I've come across on the internet (via Safari or Chrome) directly to my Apple TV.
Click to expand...
Again, this will need to be implemented in the playback application, in this case the browser for HTML5 videos, or the Flash or Silverlight plugins for others.

Also, it is not technically possible to do this for all videos that you can watch in a browser, since many are not in a format that is compatible with the Apple TV (which understands only MPEG4 videos according to Apple's specification).
This can be down on the iPhone, so I don't know why this would be a problem for a full-sized Mac.
Click to expand...
On iOS airplay is app-specific as well.
 
icebergx said:
I know most people will probably not know the answer to this but I don't really understand why Airplay (video) hasn't been implemented in OSX yet.
Click to expand...

It seems to be there since as already mentioned, Beamer makes use of it. The API is however not public/official (seems the Beamer developers have reverse engineered it). But one of these days it may appear to the public as well.

icebergx said:
Your youtube example is what I want. I'd like my Apple TV to be able access the original video stream.
Click to expand...

For this you can install a Safari extension called ClickToPlugIn. It will provide your youtube videos with a menu entry called "Send via AirPlay". Despite the name the way it works it resembles more ChromeCast than AirPlay (e.g. it seems to handover the youtube link to the ATV).
 
Last edited:
priitv8 said:
It's been implemented since 2011! But not by Google. The little thing that does this is called ClickToFlash.
There are sites, where even CTF can't grab the stream, however. One place i've seen it is the sites using Flowplayer to hide the actual stream from the browser.
Click to expand...
Yes, it worked with Youtube and a number of other sites when I last checked. But it is not a universal solution as the OP asked for.

BTW, you should use the newer ClickToPlugin now, which can also replace some other plugin-based players besides Flash.
 
Mavericks now has the ability to use Airplay for "desktop extension" instead of just "mirroring." You should test if this works better than just rote mirroring (I unfortunately can't do it right now)
 
Rigby said:
But it is not a universal solution as the OP asked for.
Click to expand...
Yes, universal would be if implemented in AVFoundation. Because Mavericks is the first iteration of QTKit to AVFoundation transition, maybe it was just not sufficiently high on product backlog?
 
slu said:
You could also spend $35 on a Chromecast and cast tabs from Chrome to the TV.
Click to expand...
Yes, but that results in a quality loss and also requires more CPU cycles, since it doesn't stream the original video stream, but re-encodes from the framebuffer.
 
NT1440 said:
Is this what you're looking for?😕

http://www.maclife.com/article/howtos/mavericks_howto_using_apple_tv_second_display

If I understood your question correctly this was one of the features that was highlighted at the mavericks keynote demo.
Click to expand...

No, I can airplay mirror without any problem. The problem is that the quality isn't good for watching sport and fast action. Click to plugin works very well for youtube, certainly better than screen mirroring, but it doesn't work on the flash media player used by my sports streaming service. 🙁
 
iHobby said:
Only the most recent Mac Mini has an HDMI port and other workarounds are kludgy and don''t work well.
Click to expand...
My Mini doesn't have an HDMI port & it works perfectly connected to my AVR via HDMI & Optical cable. It has become a really nice little media/file server. I'll have to look up kludgy. What is that, a cheap China made adapter?😉
 
It is a mystery why we can't at least AirPlay HTML5 videos [by default]. I mean, 1) they're being played through the native OSX video player, and 2) third party extensions have shown it is possible to implement Airplay in Safari.
 
icebergx said:
(...)things like beaming a youtube video to your Apple TV, without having to fully mirror your display, sounds like a simple, useful, feature.
If you can do it with your iPhone, doing it with your Mac should be pretty simple, no?
Click to expand...
It actually was 🙂

I just created a simple Chrome extension to send YouTube videos to AppleTV via AirPlay: https://github.com/czekaj/ChromePlay.

Feel free to use it and please report any issues you encounter.
 
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