Q: Mountain Lion AirPlay Mirroring (iMac to AppleTV) Not Working

This needs to work on recent Apple products.

Bought everything to get this working: mid 2009 MacBook Pro, AirPort Extreme, AppleTV, HD screen & Mountain Lion.

What the what!

@martiko

Ok mate, try to encode a pice of full HD video in H264, 1920 x 1080/25 frames in HQ on you iMac. Or try 1280 x 720. See how long it takes. Understand why it is not easy to this in real time. Live.

H264 is the technology behind Air Play Mirroring. The iPad 2, iPad 3, iPhone 4S got even better hardware acceleration for H264 than older iOS devices. Hardware acceleration is key for hours of HQ H264 video playback on your iOS device.

The lack of hardware acceleration in mobile devices is the reason behind the failure of Adobes Flash technology. No hardware acceleration = maximum battery drain, cause the CPU has to do all the work.

So because older Macs don't sport GPUs with H264 hardware acceleration those Macs are not able to deliver full quality, 25 frames live video in MIRRORING.

What bullS**t! I spend thousands of dollars on a computer. A year later the hottest features in the os update are no go. My ipad can stream airplay mirrowing no problem. Sounds like a marketing scam to buy new macs. I wish I knew of the AirPlay Mirroring feature was not supported before I updated to ML. I love reading the bad reviews all over the internet. Not to mention all the other features that are missing with Mountain Lion. I feel a class action needs to be stated because of false advertising and missing feature that I have been reading about on the Apple web page. BOOOOOOOOOOO on Apple. waste of 20 dollars. I should have just bought AirParrot and been ahead 10 dollars.

@Put_mind_ingear

hey mate, my iMac has an ATI Radeon HD 5750 built in which SURELY has H264 hardware acceleration, see for example here:

http://www.amd.com/us/products/notebook/graphics/ati-mobility-hd-5700/Pages/hd-5 750-specs.aspx

BTW... I am sure, that most users would accept a slightly lower quality (or even performance) on older devices (those withtout H264 capable GPU)... better that, than beeing locked out completely by Apple.

just wanted to add my voice to the 24 pages so far of disappointment with the way apple handled this.  I bought mountain lion just for this feature and had no idea it was not going to be available because my macbook was too old.  bad apple.

I think that I should have bought stock in whatever company is running airparrot right now.  They are going to make a killing today cause everyone who waited for Mountain Lion is now running for the airparrot program and spending another $10 on it.

I understand the need to make certain things obsolete like there phones... because lets be honest the iPhone 3 would perform so slowly with OS 5 that it is not worh it... it doesn't have the power.  And a couple hundred bucks to upgrade a phone isn't terrible most people do it anyways not just iPhone users.  However Mac makes quality computers that are supposed to last.  I bough my MacBook in 07 and this thing still basically works like the day i bought it.  Really ashamed that they didn't put airplay in the feature for all computers.  Not gonna cause me to just leave apple I still feel they make a more quality product but stuff like this will start to allow competitors to jump in and take away some business.

I fill this is a FRAUD.

Someone can explain to me how to request a refund.

I will never buy an Apple Update AGAIN.

Thanks

I wrote to the App Store and and sent the folling note:

I would like a refund. I purchased Mountain Lion for the sole purpose of being able to use AirPlay on my iMac. Unfortunately my Mac is too old to take advantage of this feature. In all of the promotional info it was never indicated that this would be an issue. I would prefer to stay with my older operating system than upgrade to one that delivers only part of what is promised.

Within a couple of hours I had a refund!

15-inch  2.4/2.2GHz

That is the macbook I am running that I purchased in 2007.  Apple has decided that it does not want to put airplay into my computer because for hardware it wouldnt work properly. Well here to tell you that I just downloaded airparrot and i am actually watching myself type this on my apple tv, after just getting done watching a video on it.  And let me tell you... it works great.  No lag no bad quality just exactly what I see on my computer on the TV screen.  So the person who invented airparrot can do it but Apples people found it difficult to do.  haha what a freaking joke.  Not upgrading my computer to a newer model just giving $10 to the airparrot people and moving on with my life.  Wish I would have found airparrot sooner probably wouldn't have upgraded my computer.

Hi Mate,

Good Point!  Although here the question is not that it can support or not, most people are shocked because they feel mis informed. I know they did put small prints at the bottom of the page. But Clearly! it didn't work !

And that is why you are seeing 1 comment evert 30 sec.

Secondly, you are talking about air play mirroring, They could have atleast added airplay, like in iphone 4 not mirroring. I am a programmer and I know it works just fine.

But the main point is, even if they did not think that way. All the people who bought it being misinformed by whoever's fault should have the right to uninstall and reimbursed like you can do with most of the softwares and OS in the world by using trial grace period.

Thanks!

btw I am not saying because I am affected, I have got Retina MBP with Free ML update.

I'm angry about this too BUT, to call it a fraud is a bit over-the-top. It was advertised as only working on newer Macs (albeit very obscurely with a tiny footnote). I wouldn't be suprised if desktop sharing functionality will be added soon for older Macs.

It's really sad that a company that used to care for its clients, suddenly forgot to mention that a key feat of its new OS isn´t available for models that worked perfectly fine since 2009, sad notice, bad feelling... #macfail

really a bad thing....

an Iphone can stream.... not a 2000$ iMac from 2010 ?

I feel for those who did not actually read the product details before buying and expected to get something Apple stated they would not be providing, but IMHO it is a bit unreasonable to expect two or three year old equipment to provide 100% of the functionality of an OS two generations newer than your original equipment. Graceful degradation has always been a part of software development and deployment and most of Mountain Lion does work in these older machines including Messages and Facetime.  And on my machine it is more responsive than Lion.

If airplay mirroring is all you are after, you can achieve that with AirParrot for half the price of Mountain Lion. It still works perfectly with Mountain Lion on my early 2009 Macbook Pro.

Even though the specs http://www.apple.com/osx/specs/ indicate that Airplay Mirroring only works for Mid 2011 and newer for iMacs, I too was misinformed when I purchased ML.  I think that instead of restricting features based on models, they should just let people use the feature and judge for themselves whether it will work or not.  If the mirroring is too slow, I would be willing to buy a new machine if mirroring was really that important to me, however I will never know because the feature is not available to test it!