Q: OS X Mountain Lion AirPlay Mirroring

One more response to Daroths:

How does this make your computer "worthless"? It is a function no Mac had 2 months ago and one that certainly did not exist or was reasonably anticipated when you purchased you computer.

What are you talking about?  High quality video, just sending my desktop. There would be no reason so send video since you can send from iTunes without issues, which also proves that chip needed is wrong.  I can send blueray quality video from iTunes to my AppleTV over AirPlay without issues and CPU doesn't even show usage. BTW they are MP4s I make myself from Blueray discs.  There are even streaming apps that convert on the fly HD high quality video so you don't have to convert for xboxes and ps3s and they don't use 1/2 of one of my 4 processors.

I myself am ok without AirPlay, too many problems installing ML, battery issues, and other things need to be fixed first.  This has to be the buggiest OSX launch ever.

Some people seem to think that because a mac can stream h264 video to an AppleTV it should do Airplay as well.

This ignores the real issue. Streaming is "easy", since h264 is highly compressed.

But that is also why Airplay is "hard": it has to compress your display contents on the fly. New macs have gpus that do that in hardware, thus solving this problem.

Older macs can/could do it, but the compression part wil/would have to be done in the cpu.

That is what an app called AirParrot does - there is a trial version. Try it and you may see that it will tax your cpu at 10percent or more - because it has to.

     10% CPU usage using AirParrot, then no problem.  Most people probably wouldn't even notice, if that low.  When I do certain tasks on mine I max out all cores at 90-100%, sometimes for 2+ hours straight.

     I would expect it to be over 50% for most people or not adding it would not make sense.  As I said though, I am waiting for patches to come before installing ML again.

     But as I said before I can transcode from one format to another on the fly and doesn't really hit my CPU and that is all CPU based.  You sort of have to with the limits that Microsoft puts on the 360 MP4 format (they only allow <4gb files).  Most of my Bluerays that I convert are 4.2-8gb, so playing them back there wont happen, most of the time I use my AppleTV 3rd Gen.

The issue at hand is that the CPU should not be spending ANY cycles on graphics, which with AirParrot, the CPU is at 100% of your graphics handling, because the GPU is completely bypassed.

This is why, when using AirPlay Mirroring, even in a computer that has 2GB of high-end nVidia graphics, the video will switch to the Intel Graphics HD 3000/4000 (either 384mb or 512mb) integrated graphics.  The nVidia graphics card is irrelevant when Mirroring through AirPlay.  If you do not have the Intel Graphics HD subprocessor, you do not have AirPlay Mirroring.  Apple made a decision not to stress the 95% of Macs sold which only have dual core processors.

Running h.264 through a dual core processor, on top of other processing duties would cause all kinds of side issues (heat, fans running at a high speed constantly, etc), as well as not performing Mirroring duties at an acceptable level.

This comment does not even consider the extra RAM usage, either.

can you send me the email for refund please ?

mkms1000 wrote:

 

can you send me the email for refund please ?

This is a site for Apple users, no-one here can send you a refund. Contact Apple Customer Relations at 1-800-767-2775.