Why does the Airplay icon fail to appear in some QuickTime videos in the QuickTime Player?

Question

Why does the Airplay icon fail to appear in some QuickTime videos in the QuickTime Player?

I recently took 4 drone videos and within the QuickTime Player, exported each to 480p, 720p, and 1080p H.264 MP4s from the 4K MP4 source.

When I opened them up last week on my 32GB M2 Max MBP 16, only one of the videos showed the Airplay icon in the QuickTime Player. My goal was to airplay them to my AppleTV that I'd brought with me 8400 miles to Africa.

Today, I'm 8400 miles away from that AppleTV and I open up all of the videos on the same MBP but the Airplay icon appears in the scrubber overlay for all of the videos in QuickTime.

Why?

What are the criteria that determine if a video can be airplayed within the QuickTime Player or not? There's no information that I can find on the Apple support site. Nothing that will tell you what is required for a video to support Airplay.

Why would the "airplayness" of a video change when opened on the same device?

What are the criteria that enable a video to be airplayed?

Posted on May 9, 2024 5:54 PM

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Answer 1

May 11, 2024 3:13 AM in response to Alex Zavatone

Not all QuickTime media files are AirPlay compatible. It depends on codecs and encoding settings. If incompatible, a conversion may need to be done. If you will, please post the (extended) media file details from an analyses tool like Invisor Lite or MediaInfo, for a file that didn’t show the AirPlay icon in the controller bar.

E.g. QuickTime Player can play .mpg files, but will not AirPlay those.

E.g. iTunes Store movies in DRM’d .m4v format can be played in QuickTime Player, but AirPlay from QTP would’t be available.

I would say the ‘safest’ codecs for AirPlay compatibility are .mp4/.mov/.m4v files with H.264 video and AAC audio. H.265 compatibility would depend on the receiving device as well.

If the Mac is reasonably modern and fast, and the file is not DRM’d, then you can always try screen mirroring instead. That involves additional screen capture, scaling to 1080p, and encoding that on the fly, so it is a bit more taxing on the computer (and the network: relatively high bitrate). Switch QuickTime Player to present in full screen mode (menu View﹥Enter Full Screen) for the cleanest presentation.

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Answer 2

May 11, 2024 1:57 PM in response to Urquhart1244

But these are the SAME videos. Just opened a second time in another location - 8000 miles away - on the same laptop.

The videos are all H.264 with an AAC audio track. All exported from QuickTime Player's File Export As menu options of 1080p, 720p and 480p.

Only one displayed the Airplay icon (one 1080p) when opened in my MacBook's QuickTime Player Version 10.5 (1184.2) when I was in Africa. 8000 miles away, they all display it with no changes to any of the files.

Whhhhy?

Also, thank you for the tools.

We used screen mirroring to the AppleTV since even the 480p files would not display the Airplay icon. We were in the middle of a business meeting trying to appear competent so this was very unpleasant. More info from Apple on this defining the specifics required for the Airplay icon to display would be dearly appreciated.

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