Airplay slow and choppy.

Are you using an Apple TV 2nd generation or 3rd generation? Only the Apple TV 3rd generation supports full 1080p video. So if you're trying to Airplay 1080p video to a 2nd gen ATV, you're gonna have a bad time.

Furthermore, is your internet speed really 6MB (megabytes) per second? Or do you mean 6Mb (megabits) per second? Because there's a huge difference there. 6 megabits is only about 0.75 megabytes. And an internet speed of 0.75 megabytes per second isn't really good enough for Airplay.

Woah. That's some fast Internet. Can't get that in the US without paying a lot. Anyway, I doubt RAM is the issue. I have a MacBook Pro from 2006 with only 2 GB RAM and it can AirPlay just fine. Your CPU is also very good. Maybe it is an issue with network interference. Also, what type of file are you streaming to your ATV? .m4v works the best. I've tried streaming .avi files to my ATV before via Plex Media Center and it's been very leggy.

Try converting some of your existing media to .m4v and see if it makes a difference. I use a free program called Adapter which is pretty nice for converting files. http://www.macroplant.com/adapter/

daocone,

I had been noticing similar behavior on my own wireless network while trying to stream videos from the web while projecting to my TV through airplay.

I seemed to be getting poor wireless performance on my local network while speed tests were within my expectations.

I experienced two issues which occasionally overlapped but were not necessarily dependend upon one another:

1) Videos streaming to the AppleTV would freeze up while they continued to play normally on the laptop

2) Laptop would occasionally stop to buffer video, with little other network traffic.

I did a little digging and looked in to the wireless configurations of all of my network components.

I also used KisMAC2 to get an idea of nearby wireless routers (I'm in a large building with many competing networks).

I found a solution for my problem but first a little background about my home network:

From the perspective of my laptop...

Laptop --wireless--> Netgear(switch mode) --ethernet--> Airport Extreme (normal router) --ethernet--> Cable Modem

My Apple TV is a wired client of the netgear router.

AppleTV --ethernet--> Netgear(switch mode) ...

While I'm not sure which fixed the issue, I made two major changes to my wireless routers settings:

1) I switched the access point from a mixed mode (b/g/n) to exclusively use G on a 5.0 Ghz band.

Two reasons for this:

--a) I have heard that mixed mode access points have the potential to lose 'throughput' when multiple clients using slower protocols are present on the network. I'm sure this varies with vendor, firmware, and hardware; it's probably not relevant here but I am including this because I see where it could be for other users with similar problems.

--b) 5.0 Ghz can offer a less hostile signal environment. The 2.5Ghz band has many devices competing in the same signal space, including cordless phones and microwaves. - As I'm surrounded by wireless devices, I made the switch.

2) I switched the access point's channel from 'automatic' to one which seemed to be less saturated with traffic (Use KisMAC2 to determine this).

After making these changes and restarting my access point I was able to stream the same video to the TV with much better quality. The freezing issue had been bothering me for some time and I'm hoping this will be a permanent fix.

Isn't G on a 2.4 GHz frequency? I think you meant to say N, which is on 5 GHz. I'm on an N-only configured wireless network and I'm still having quality issues (video and sound) when streaming from my MacBook Air to a gen 2 Apple TV. I'm using AirPlay to stream a high def video that is played on VLC and the wireless bandwith usage peaks at around 5MB/s to 6MB/s. I'm having issues playing AVI's on QuickTime, but I hope to resolve that issue with the hope that AirPlay streaming will work without any choppiness.

nickel, I believe you are correct.

I wrote my initial response with respect to to the labels I was presented within the router interfaces. Neither the Apple nor the Netgear devices do a great job of disambiguating the settings. I will review my post and hopefully make corrections when I have time.

As for your issue...

I'm not sure if you've tried these...

As far as I know N can be 2.4 or 5Ghz.

How is your network configured as there are more options than 'N' ?

In some Apple base stations you can give the 2.4 and 5Ghz networks different SSIDs within the advanced options. This is likely true for other access points as well.

Have you checked for competing networks in the area with a tool like KisMac or net stumbler?

I'm suggesting two things:

1) Your wireless access point MAY be hosting 2.4 and 5Ghz 'N' networks with the same SSID and your client device is connecting to the 2.4 network without respect to speed

2) Be it 2.4 or 5 ghz, there may be wireless interference from other access points. I only mention it because I haven't seen you rule it out.

Apple TV and Mac computers are having this problem as far as I know with all routers. This problem caused by network settings. I have, Cisco Linksys e2500 router. I will explain base on my router. If you have diffrent brend router this explanitaion still will help you how to figure out... Got to your browser ~ copy and paste 192.168.1.1 , enter, if it's ask user name and password; leave the login/user name blank and into password section type, admin. Go to Aplications and Gaming tab. Look for QoS. Clik it and look for VMM. Factory settings comes as Enable but you need to change that to Disable and save setting. If streaming is still slow restart all your devices.

Hi Upple!

Thanks for this advice! Since I disabled VWW the connection improved significanly! but still there is some lagging and some times the images just stay still for a few seconds.

Is there another recomendation about this? I have the same E2500 router

Thanks agian!

On your router you should set "Wireless mode" to "Up to 54Mbps" and then everything will work! 😉

(You can find out that setting within "Setup" and then within "Wireless Settings" - it is not in advanced)

Higher speeds do not work - I do not know why - although I would like to see a post about the reason... 🙂

Good luck!

Wow! What a difference that made. Ty so much!