Airplay, FCPX, and Premiere working surprisingly well

[Mitch Ives]

[Michael Garber] “Set up Mountain Lion tonight on my Late 2011 Macbook Pro.”

In reading the tech specs, it seems to indicate that you need a 2011 or newer Mac to use it. Does anyone know if laptops, iMacs, MacPro’s, etc . that are older than “mid 2011” can use AirPlay? If so, I’m buying some Apple TV’s…

Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill

[Paul Dickin]

[Mitch Ives] “Does anyone know if laptops, iMacs, MacPro’s, etc . that are older than “mid 2011″ can use AirPlay?”

Hi
Quote:
“The reason you need a 2011 Mac to make use of AirPlay Mirroring in OS X Mountain Lion is because the graphics in older Macs just don’t cut the mustard.

It’s simple: the secret sauce that Apple requires to make AirPlay Mirroring work is on-GPU H.264 encoding, or the ability to compress video on your device’s actual graphic chips without calling upon the CPU.
Without physical hardware support, mirroring eats a huge chunk of CPU, which means performance would be hindered to a point Apple would never allow.”

It’s not just Macs that can’t use AirPlay Mirroring if they are older than 2011: even on the iOS side of things, you need a minimum of an iPhone 4S or an iPad 2 to use AirPlay Mirroring on your Apple TV.Because older iOS devices don’t have on-GPU H.264 encoding either.

For the modern chipsets Apple has written drivers to access the on-GPU H264 encoding. Since the image of whatever is on screen is already in your graphics’ frame buffer, all Apple needs to do is the scaling (the most expensive part of AirPlay Mirroring, which is why you have ‘Best for AirPlay’ resolutions that are 1:1), the color conversion (H.264 video needs YUV color space vs. RGB), and the actual encoding itself right on the GPU. Then, Apple only has to transmit the relatively small encoded video stream to the Apple TV.

That’s not to say that it’s impossible for Apple to do AirPlay Mirroring on a Mac without on-GPU H.264 encoding. AirParrot is an app that proves exactly the opposite: all that is required is a multi-core CPU. But things can definitely get hot, and Apple hates that.

The H. 264 encoding is actually plenty fast enough on any modern multi-core CPU, but the scaling and colorspace conversion processes are still pretty intensive.The compromise is that on older machines, AirParrot uses a non-trivial amount of CPU, which can result in the fans kicking and the machine getting a little warm… but even with on-GPU AirPlay Mirroring, 2011 MacBook owners will still notice the heat.

Whether you use AirParrot or AirPlay Mirroring, on a newer Mac or an older one, though, the real bottleneck for most users isn’t going to be whether the H.264 encoding was done on the CPU or on the GPU… it’s going to be your network.

You really need a top-notch network to do Airplay Mirroring of say, a web-based video player, with smooth low latency audio and video, That means an AirPort Express N router or any other high-quality brand router, and a pretty uncongested network.

Read more at https://www.cultofmac.com/178460/the-real-reason-why-macs-before-2011-cant-use-airplay-mirroring-in-mountain-lion-feature/#O8rXcpE9fLQPGvii.99

[Mitch Ives]

Thanks for the info. I wonder if having a 5870 in the MacPro would allow it to work?

Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill

[John Davidson]

Airplay will only work with new macs (2011 or higher) with the Intel quick play feature in it. I think that’s the name of it anyways.

My 2010 mac pro with a 5770 in it won’t work. Sadness.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[Brevig Madison]

I know this post is from a couple of months ago, but I just found it because of my search. What I have been trying to accomplish all day is to use airplay as a video monitor. I was a little bit disappointed that the airplay built in to Mountain Lion does not support the ability to use the appleTV output as a second monitor, although considering it is called “AirPlay Mirroring” I guess I dont have the right to be. However, in my searching I found AirParrot which had pretty Good reviews so I was willing to shell out the $10 for the experiment. AirParrot works just as seamlessly for mirroring as the built in AirPlay ability, but it also supports the option of extending your desktop, using the HDTV connected to the AppleTV as a true dual display setup. However, I have been very disappointed in FCPX ability to utilize the second display. While it does offer the ability to “Show Viewer on second display,” What I am really looking for is for the video on the second display to be completely unobstructed full screen playback while I am looking at the timeline on my iMac. The frustrating part is that when I choose “Full Screen Playback” or hit Shift-Cmd-F, the video plays full screen on my TV, but the screen on my iMac goes black!

This was the source of quite a bit of frustration today, and I still have not been able to achieve my desired result in FCPX. I did find a work around to be able to accomplish what I am looking for using FCP 7, but not FCPX. Any thoughts on this? I have never tried to hard wire a dual display setup for FCPX, so I am not sure if this is what anyone would get with a dual display setup or if this just has to do with my current setup using AirParrot and AirPlay to create the second display. Any thoughts or potential workarounds for achieving my desired results? Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you,

Brevig Madison

[Chris Butler]

I want to do the same thing, but with Premiere. Have you tried using airparrot as a video monitor in that?