will apple tv "airplay" my avi files from ipad/phone/mac?

it depend on the apps airplay itself mirror what the ios display show

but if the app is made to block airplay it don't work

and only iphone4S and later and ipad2 and later support it

forget ipod touch generation

If what you mean if it can support it by access from a shared itunes lib then no this and only this is supported

http://www.apple.com/appletv/specs.html

"H.264 video up to 1080p, 30 frames per second, High or Main Profile level 4.0 or lower, Baseline profile level 3.0 or lower with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps per channel, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats

MPEG-4 video up to 2.5 Mbps, 640 by 480 pixels, 30 frames per second, Simple Profile with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats

Motion JPEG (M-JPEG) up to 35 Mbps, 1280 by 720 pixels, 30 frames per second, audio in ulaw, PCM stereo audio in .avi file format"

you need to convert the avi files to the supported formats

add the files to itunes (this need not change where the files are stored)

otherwise your appletv can't play them

AceNeerav wrote:

this is really lame. iOS devices dont have non native and software rendered playback cause they consume a lot of battery via cpu usage apart from gpu usage. that is understandable as a design choice for portable devices that run on battery. but I dont see why apple tvs should not play avi and other files.

Neerav

They never have, they won't in the future unless there's a major change in Apple's opinion on how you should be able to use your devices.

AC

AceNeerav wrote:

this is really lame. iOS devices dont have non native and software rendered playback cause they consume a lot of battery via cpu usage apart from gpu usage. that is understandable as a design choice for portable devices that run on battery. but I dont see why apple tvs should not play avi and other files.

Neerav

it's not just a battery issue also a performance and skipping of frame issue

AVI is not a format it's a container which can use 100's of difference video codecs

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Video_Interleave

some likely ones which ios devices and atv which is the same hardware as ios devices

would not be able to play back with a good framerate

that being said then maybe apple didn't count of that large % of atv buyers had 300 gbs of home videos

and putting a lot of afford into making their hardware (which I doubt they really make money on but make up for from itunes sales) support a wide range of possibly shady videos would not really make much sense

at least if I were in apples shoes that would be my logic

if you want to give apples a piece of your mind since this being a user helping user forum which they don't read or write use feedback

http://www.apple.com/feedback/appletv.html

I would provide that feedback to them directly

AceNeerav wrote:

Hello,

I am pretty much familiar with container and component video. What i am saying is that if the rendering device has already undergone cpu cycles to soft render the video into a video stream that the gpu of a mac or an ios understand, then it should be understandable by the apple tv as well. Its not like its being made to decode no native codecs.

In case the rendering happens inside the apple tv, then too there are 3rd party players that when loaded via jailbreaks can play avis. So i dont see why apple cant drop acid and let us make good use of our digital hub.

I dont mind paying for mp4 content but its simply not available via itunes, in india.

AppleTV does normally decode an h264 stream sent to it via Airplay or pulled from itunes on a LAN. The encoded video is decompressed locally to reduce the bandwidth needed to send decompressed video.

While I appreciate AppleTV's could use other codecs, run browsers, email clients, games etc, Apple in their 'wisdom' have decided not to allow this as part of the AppleTV business model.

Airplay Mirroring uses a form of screen sharing technology.

AC

AceNeerav wrote:

Browsers? Email clients? Games? What ru talking about!?

AppleTV is a small computer. It has an OS. It could do anything you want it to within hardware limitations so the same applies to video decoding of a multitude of codecs - it supports a handful of codecs it doesn't support others. End of. Apple have decided what codecs to support. It is immaterial that it could support others if Apple chooses not to implement them.

My point is that it could do any number of things that we often see requested here - 'why can't I have apps?', 'why no games?', 'why no Safari?', 'why no email on my TV?'.

Can't you see that?

I know this is a fairly old post, but just incase anyone is still looking.. you can use an app called Beamer to AirPlay any file format to Apple tv. I've been using it for a while now and it's amazing.