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 -- 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>
