Hi Neil Responding re your AirParrot question:
I've spent the last hour or so typing up a response, then testing AirParrot again. Final result is that it is too early to give a review, but it is much more promising than I first thought. The bad video effects may just be due to my relatively underpowered iMac having to download a compressed iView movie (that has artefacts at the best of time) while simultaneously converting to H.264 for sending to ATV. Another possible cause of poor video (untested) is that initial tests were done with Apple TV connected via ethernet, with todays tests using WiFi. Operation is a bit clumsy. For example, several items need to be checked in the menu to set up air play, but the menu window closes after each item. Sound quality is good. Audio is stereo analogue and is either desktop or ATV. Setup requires an audio driver to be activated. Desktop mirroring worked with no apparent problem, but I only used relatively static views for a short time. Could not read fine text, eg from an email open on screen. But I don't think iPad mirroring does any better. Video quality - initial impression was not very good. I recall video quality was very ordinary. Video streaming was slow with periods of frozen images - possibly the result of encoding everything to H.264 (I think) on the fly. I tested iView with a 5 minute Minuscule episode and an eyeTV mirroring clip just before I emailed my comment to WAMUG last night. I later watched a 15 minute iView program but ATV just switched to screen saver and cut off audio at about the half way mark. Problem not investigated. There was a known AirParrot issue with video failing when ATV went into sleep mode (supposedly fixed) but my ATV sleep setting is 1 hour. I tested video quality again this morning because of my initial poor rating. I used WiFi instead of ethernet. Only watched video for relatively short periods. Quality good. An eyeTV live broadcast mirroring worked well with no image break up. Ditto with a movie played via Quicktime and mirrored. And iView continued to give poor quality, broken video, as well as dropping out completely. In summary, I will persevere with this $10 application but hope that Mountain Lion will make it redundant. I will get additional RAM for my iMac and see if that helps the iView problem. Haven't yet tried to watch a straight 30 minute mirror to test the ATV sleeping issue. Cheers Alan On 20/06/2012, at 10:36 AM, Neil Houghton wrote: Hi Alan, OK, that's good to know. Many thanks for the feedback. When you say: > App is a bit rough, but it works. What is the problem/roughness - is it in the interface/operability or is it in the resulting video/audio stream? Cheers Neil -- Neil R. Houghton Albany, Western Australia Tel: +61 8 9841 6063 Email: n...@possumology.com -- The WA Macintosh User Group Mailing List -- Archives - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/archives.shtml> Guidelines - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/guidelines.shtml> Settings & Unsubscribe - <http://lists.wamug.org.au/listinfo/wamug.org.au-wamug>
