Hi Alan, I thank you very much for the detailed appraisal (and sympathise with your frustration).
Maybe we might get lucky with Mountain lion supporting this feature on the (slightly) older iMacs ;o) Cheers Neil -- Neil R. Houghton Albany, Western Australia Tel: +61 8 9841 6063 Email: n...@possumology.com on 22/6/12 10:20 PM, Alan Smith at sma...@iinet.net.au wrote: > Hi Neil > > A final AirParrot wrap-up on this thread. In short: alas, alas. > > I increased RAM on my Mac from 4GB to 12GB (thanks Daniel) but it made no > difference to watching movies via AirParrot. > > AP works well when mirroring a fairly static application. It projects it to > near full TV size, independent of its window size on the iMac. It also worked > well when mirroring the MacBook Pro retina display sales video from the home > page of the Apple website, but audio lip movements were slightly out of sync > with the video. Because it was displaying the Safari application with its > full borders as per a computer display, the actual video content was say 20 > percent of the window area. I then played a Minuscule episode in Preview via > Finder and enlarged the playback to about the size of a Safari window. Jerky > playback indicating no buffering (?) and video quality was also degraded. A > live eyeTV program was similar with jerky playback and only fair video > quality. It seems that the area of the video within the Mac app window has a > major impact. Doesn't appear to be any difference between AppleTV connected > via ethernet or AirPort. > > I had trouble with mirroring the Mac desktop as distinct from mirroring > individual applications. AppleTV kept dropping out. Didn't pursue this. > > It doesn't play nicely with iView at all. Long periods of paused video even > on fairly static content. And Apple TV connection frequently lost. iView > playback defaults to full screen mode when it starts - AirParrot can't handle > that at all. I resized to my normal Safari window area to give a watchable > TV size for my tests but didn't try a very small playback window. Didn't try > YouTube. > > The AirParrot app itself is not very robust. I had to restart the Mac twice > when AP gave the spinning beach ball. AP does not appear in the list of apps > to permit a Force Quit. AP FAQs state that for some issues the app should be > closed for several minutes to recover! > > Cheers > Alan > > > On 20/06/2012, at 12:52 PM, Alan Smith wrote: > > 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 -- 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>
