Q: When using airplay from mac to apple tv it lags/freezes, but works fine with iPhone

Finally figured it out: just unplug the ethernet cable from you AppleTV.

As soon as I connected my AppleTV to my network through wifi, mirroring my Mac became smooth. Who'd have thought?!

Hope this trick works out for everyone else.

Good luck.

AppleTV 3rd Gen

MBPr 13" Mid 2014

Equally if the Mac and the Apple TV are both wired connections it works well.

Surely this could now be sorted out with all the time elapsed and suggested fixes from this forum.

Andrew

Still the same problem years later. Tried everything. Turning WMM off, using ethernet, changing channel etc..

Please Apple you should be able to help the thousands of people having this issue!! - But apparently you don´t give a f*ck

That does seem the inevitable conclusion.  Bit like the self assigned IP address bug. Been around for ages.

AS

Yes this issue seems counter-intuitive until one thinks about how this works. I am a systems programmer, but since I do not have access to the internals of OS X, I can only make an educated guess as to the root of this "problem."

There are two distinct parts to Airplay: audio/video and mirroring. When our iDevices send audio or audio/video or photo's to the AppleTV, it sends the audio or audio/video information as a stream of data that is then decoded by the AppleTV in a way that preserves temporal integrity. Think of this as the same way you receive a Netflix movie or a streaming audio song. In fact, it's the same concept exactly, and we all know that Netflix or Spotify would be useless if it was choppy or laggy. This is an efficient means of transporting data, hence it just works.

Mirroring involves the extra step that slows things down: scanning your screen and input audio which then has to be processed and packaged for transport locally from our MacBooks. Only then can it be sent over-the-air to the AppleTV. This is a necessary, incredibly processor intensive task that is the difference between using Airplay on our iDevices vs our more powerful computers. So why does mirroring work perfectly from our iDevices? Because Apple uses a trick that recognizes audio or audio/video streams from our iDevices and temporarily "switches" to the non-mirroring form of Airplay - have you ever noticed that when "mirroring" from an iPhone or iPad, as soon as you start a video, the TV screen gracefully fades out and then back in quickly to a full screen version of the multimedia? To confirm this hypothesis, try mirroring from a Safari page in iPad vs mirroring from a Safari page on Mac OS X. You'll notice that from the iPad, your AppleTV will show only the video in full-screen on the TV (non-mirroring) but from the computer, you'll see the web page and the video in an identical configuration as what you're seeing on your computer screen (mirroring). This way, the iPad and iPhone don't have to perform this extra "step" and everything stays smooth.

So why doesn't Apple employ this same technique on our expensive, powerful computers? I think it's because mirroring from a computer was designed to be more of a "second screen" for our PC's in which case we would be truly ****** if our AppleTV's could not mirror a webpage or application if video or audio/video was present whereas this is not important for iPads and iPhones. As annoying as this is, I fear that it is working as designed, and this problem will only get worst as CPU's move to mobile architectures to save energy unless Apple works on optimizing the efficiency of it's Airplay algorithms.

To address the post that mentioned that this all works much smoother from wired connections, this has to do with the fact that the algorithms to mirror vs stream audio/video only are much less efficient. It took 30 years of software optimization to learn how to efficiently stream audio/video (non-mirroring), but even if the scanning/processing step (mirroring) from our computers was wholly efficient, there is still way more information to send over the network to the AppleTV due to the way data must be packaged to truly mirror a screen.

I encounter the same problem.

My Macbook Pro is in good condition, all the updates are done on both the Apple TV and The Mac. The lag is not always there but it comes back eventually. iPad or iPhone don't pose any kind of lag. The lag is both audio and video. the only way I manage to get rid of it is reboot both devices (sometimes more than once) and it gets back to normal, sometimes for a number of days, some other times only minutes.

Furthermore, i encountered a similar problem with bluetooth speakers and headphones. the audio only lags occasionally, which has led me to think the origin of this problem might be from the Mac itself rather than the Apple TV. I hope they fix the issues soon and won't wait for the release of El Capitan to correct this.

hello

switching off bluetooth on macbook pre retina 2013 didn't help

switching off bluetooth on apple tv 3 fixed the issue

hope it helps

thanks everyone for your input

I have tried everything does not seem to work. latest iOS, wifi -100mbps, BT off, still both audio and video are jerky and freeze.

There is definitely some problem with Macbook. iPhone plays perfectly fine.

Are these post monitored by Apple or we are just bunch of disgrunted users, venting our frustrations

M

Just turn off the bluetooth from the Apple TV setting, then everything will be working normal! Even stream from your mac!

Thanx krissoundz,

I did try turning BT off on Apple TV and macbook as well.

No improvement

Same issue here. I have:

Apple Tv 3

Macbook Pro Retina, Yosemite 10.10.3, i7 2,3Ghz, 16GB DDR3, Nvidia GT 750M
Asus AC68U
(so it should obviously work flawless)

First i tried with all wireless, no hope.

Wired the apple tv, no hope, actually made it worse.

This worked for me:

* Making a guest network and connecting macbook to that, kept te apple tv wired.

This changed everything. So no question that there are some interference issues with wireless settings. I guess the guest network runs on a different channel (main wireless is set to auto). Also that it probably only uses 2.4Ghz and not both/5Ghz.

I still wasn't completely happy, I felt it dropped some frames here and there, so I changed the apple tv hdmi output to 720p to make the bitstream smaller, which made it "perfect" (considering we live in 2015 it's absolute garbage).

Guys: THIS WORKS!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LY2weHeKUI8

Thank you so much for linking to this video. The resolution is somewhat convoluted... but it works! No lagging when streaming between my Macbook Pro and Apple TV. What a shame the Muppets at Apple don't have a resolution and leave us to struggle alone. I thought we were meant to be valued customers?

Well the problem with lag is when mirroring, so a solution is not extending your desktop (which always worked). If you have a problem with making a call on your iPhone, sending a sms instead is not a fix.

Completely, I get that. But I've just watched a film via my laptop in 1080HD for the first time without any glitches, so for me, that's a fix.

I have the same problem.

- It lags (both video and audio) when I play downloaded media file on TV with airplay

- When I mirror it, the media plays fine on my PC screen but lags on TV (both video and audio)

- Tried both mirroring option as well as extended display option, they both lag the same way.

- I cannot even play youtube video from my mac when it's on airplay.

I am in Sweden and busy during weekdays (customer service only available on weekdays), so I called US customer service on my weekend here. I was on this INTERNATIONAL CALL FOR 2 HOURS AND NO ANSWERS FROM APPLE! I talked to both macbook and apple tv specialist.

They had me go through all the trouble shooting steps. I had to educate them that these trouble shooting steps would be irrelevant as this is a common issue that at least 180,000 users are suffering.

Connection is not a problem - I tried all the steps, turned off router, macbook pro, apple tv and turned them back again.

AirPlay from iPhone 6, iPhone 5s is fine - connection, communication between devices is not a problem

If you use 3rd party software called Beamer - it solves all problems - this software bridges the gap and plays the media file, which means apple tv is not a problem, macbook itself is not a problem. But this is not proper Apple way and you have to pay for it so I do not want to use this forever. 

After 2 hours, the customer service agent tried to make me restore my apple tv and macbook pro. Is he crazy???

I hope this gets fixed soon.