Mountain Lion AirPlay Mirroring (iMac to AppleTV) Not Working

I am also very upset and feel misled by the marketing of the airplay function. My mid 2010 macbook pro could always airplay things from itunes. I feel ripped off from buying mountain lion and strongarmed into upgrading devices. Is this the new CEO's style? I hope not or you can kiss me goodbye as a customer.

Along with the rest of you i am really peeved at Apple over this. i have just tried the AirParrot app and it works fine but why should we have to pay for an app to do what we all expected Mountain Lion to do. Hang your heads in shame Apple.

Hi, I know is is quite bad is i have a mid 2010 iMac. However download AirParrot, OK its not free, but it will allow you to airplay mirror straight to your apple tv. It is really awsome!!! Also if you like airplay, then you might also like reflection, its made buy the same guys, but that airplays to your mac, google it, its great.

AirParrot- http://airparrot.com

Reflection- http://www.reflectionapp.com

I had same problem NO AIRPLAY on iMac 2007... got AIRPARROT and is working great.

Apple is make a joke on this, aren't they?

For me personally, the AirPlay was the Key Feature for the upgrade to Mountain Lion.

Not I tried and searched, updated my ATV and... still not working. Until I found out that my iMac ist "too old" for this feature... WHAT? Come on guys... AirPlay mirroring... This isn't something you need the latest HW and most powerfull CPU (or whatever).

My iMac is just 2 years old (Mid 2010), with i7 processor, still one of the fastest around... and Apple thinks it is not "good enough" for AirPlay. Sorry, this is rediculous!

By the way, even 3rd party Apps provide AirPlay for ANY (unfortunately up to now without audio, so not a real alternative).

Now I've spend 15 Euro for... nothing. The rest Cloud-bases "features" are absolutely not interesting for me.

Honestly... Apple has to fix this, this will annoy many, many Customers with really up to date hardware...

To be fair... I absolutely understand, that espacially on iOS, some features are not available on "older" devices due to low CPU power (and also low memory). But this can't an argument for not enabling AirPlay for quite new Macs...

You think you guys who bought Mountain Lion in vain are upset. I bought an Apple TV only for the mirroring function. The only thing I have my aTV for now is youtube, yeah that was fun for about 5 minutes.

This isn't Apple strong-arming anyone into upgrading. The reason Mirroring only works on 2011 Macs is because older Macs lack something called on-GPU H.264 rendering - essentially it means that older Macs would have to render and, more importantly, compress the video stream with the CPU, which would cripple the performance of even newer Macs. It's a bad situation but Apple has an actual, technical for the omission.

@hayden0103

Are you kidding? Even iPhone an iPad are AirPlay capable... iPad 3 even with 2.048 x 1.536... Surely, this uses GPU on the iDevice, but nevertheless... all "not too old" Macs (at least with i5 and i7) have SURELY enough compute power to render and compress a stream... And this is not just a theoretical thought, look at airparrot which works really smooth, even on older Macs.

I wanted an "official" solution, and as AirPlay was announced for Mountain Lion, I did not purchase Airparrot... Now I feel ripped off.

There was no clear communication which Macs are (in Apples mind) not "AirPlay capable"...

Well done to Air Parrot.. have just found out my year old iMac is too old to use Mountain Lion,s mirroring have taken the advice to try air parrot and there it is on the screen...well done to Air Parrot and a big NO NO to Apple

Joined the ripped off club.

$99.00 aple TV and 20$ ML OS

tricked again.

Dissapointed in Apple.

I guess they can get away with it. No iPhone for me.

The A4 chips in the iPad and iPhone 4 lacked on-GPU H.264 rendering. The A5/A5X have this ability.

And yes, you're right in that AirParrot can enable older Macs to AirPlay Mirror. But AP's devs have stated they took a great amount of care to limit CPU use through lots of specific coding. And I can guarantee that a GPU-based solution performs far better than a CPU based solution.

It ***** for us (and I'm in the same boat as the rest of this thread - last gen unibody plastic MacBook), but Apple made a judgement call to use the same solution for all systems, instead of building a second rendering/streaming framework for older devices.

That is such BS Apple! ***!? MacBook Pro, 15-inch, Mid 2010, 2.66 GHz Intel Core i7, 8 GB 1067 MHz DDR3, NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M 512 MB and no AirPlay support... I want my money back!

This is a bad move from apple. Not impressed. In the interest in selling new macs they make airplay unavailable. I would like to see the proof that it wasn't possible to get it working on an older 64 bit mac.

I downloaded mountain lion for this feature for both my macs and now I want to undo it.

Can that be done? I lost a couple of apps in the upgrade. Little snitch being the most important reason for me to want to go back.

I have the latest MacPro (Mid 2010) and it does not work. That is truly sad. But why would a business need to project a screen on a TV or a projector?!?

Aaaaapple, please do something!!!

I just want to share this with you guys as I find it an outrage!

I have just called "Apple care" to complain about this very problem with Airplay. I have a mid 2010 MBP and an ATV2. I bought the ATV2, like many here, on the basis that I would be able to stream from my desktop on the eventual release of ML.

The person I spoke to told me that Airplay should work as my MBP was within the minimum requirements for 10.8 (he actually read me the FULL list of compatable devices and system requirements!). I tried to explain that even though this is the case Airplay does not seem to be supported and quoted what has been written here (i5 processor, mid 2011 etc etc) His response was "this is Apple here" i.e YOU GUYS DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT, including me. I was told technical support is closed and I have to call back. When I requested a call back I was told this is not possible either.

Where did it all go wrong Apple? I have had problems in the past and when I have contacted "Apple care" they couldn't do enough to help. Also, WHY IS THE TECHNICAL TEAM CLOSED AFTER THE RELEASE OF A MAJOR OS UPDATE?!!!