Q: AirPlay Mirroring Video Stutter

AirPlay mirroring is very sensitive to latency, something that wireless networks are notorious for. With AirPlay mirroring, your device renders the screen locally before mirroring it onto the Apple TV. If you're watching a movie that has a framerate of 24 fps, there can be at most 41.7 ms between frames. That means your device needs to render the screen and transfer it across your network all within a window of 41.7 ms. If any of the data packets are corrupted or lost due to interference, you'll have a much smaller window to work with. Ditto if you are watching a movie with a higher frame rate. At 60 fps, the window shrinks to 16.7ms.

In short, latency matters. A lot.

A wired network's latency is typically around 0.5ms and you don't have to worry about lost or corrupted packets unless router is on its last legs. With wireless on the other hand, I've seen latencies as high as 80ms though they're typically in the 30 - 50ms range. My wireless network's latency now hovers at around 10ms. Here's a list of settings I changed that was beneficial:

• Disable support for older wifi standards. If you don't have any 802.11g devices, just use 802.11n.
• Some routers have a "Greenfield" mode. This further improves efficiency by assuming that only 802.11n or later devices are on the network.
• Choose a WiFi channel that is not used by any other wireless network. Having more than one network per channel severely increases latency in addition to reducing bandwidth.
• Use 5GHz WiFi if possible. These are less prone to interference and as these frequencies are less common you're less likely to be sharing your channel another network.

With those changes, I brought down by latency from about 40ms to 10 ms. AirPlay mirroring now works flawlessly. Until the microwave oven comes on ... but it's an improvement in general

This is not a wifi issue at all.

Macbook pro playing a video file to apple tv 3rd gen....stutters.

Same file put on iPad Air then airplay to apple tv....smooth.

Not a wifi issue.

Macbookpro retina issue.

Plain and simple...it is everywhere on the apple discussions....everywhere.

The reason you're seeing the difference between the iPad and MacBook Pro is because the MacBook Pro only mirrors to the Apple TV while the iPad supports both mirroring and normal mode. Normal AirPlay mode requires much less bandwidth and is a lot less sensitive to latency.

I did this to solve the latency, stuttering issue:

1. Made a new profile on my early 2011 mbp 17" with no network related services (dropbox, box, google drive etc)

2. Turned off bluetooth

3. Instead of just mirroring, i selected the "extend desktop" option

These steps helped to maximize the streaming without any hiccup.

(Just watched The Hobbit - desolation of Smaug on my Toshiba 58L7300U without any trouble, video went smooth)

(My ATV is wired through a 2010 airport extreme base with a speed of 10megas)

Bravo...tx

I had this issue. I converted the file to MP4 (using Handbrake app) then dragged into iTunes. Played perfectly after that every time