Q: How to make Beamer work on Apple TV with Mac

I have no firsthand experience with the product but with a little searching I found the support page for it. The topic, "The Apple TV stops during playback to load and buffer" may be helpful in finding a solution for you.

The same source also suggests checking Apple's Resolve issues with AirPlay and AirPlay Mirroring from iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch for help.

Welcome to the Apple Community.

Despite what 3rd party providers might tell you, there is a perfectly good reason that Apple don't support Airplay on older Macs. Some users have said they are happy with these products, but I'd be inclined not to get too surprised when they don't work as advertised.

If the Mac is older and doesn't support AirPlay, this is because Apple have deemed that the hardware is not sufficient to support it. Third party companies have worked around this with software only solutions, however it's my feeling that Apple would have provided a software solution too if they thought the experience of using it wasn't degraded. Of course the cynical out there might say this is just to sell new hardware.

Your milage my vary, all I'm saying is if you are happy with 3rd party solutions all well and good, but don't be surprised if they don't work as well as they are advertised.

It also depends on the kind of video you want to stream. Any format other than .mp4 or .m4v requires conversion which beamer "performs" on the fly.

Only high end macs are able to perform this conversion in real time which means beamer has to send the video in small chunks followed by long pauses, which sometimes results in an interrupted video

There is an open source application called torrenTV that's similar to beamer except it only supports .MP4s.

Could you try it?

Yes your network has to work properly before any of these services including Airplay itself can be expected to work.

Are you sure you have an issue, what makes you assume that you have.

If you extended your network the device you use would be a base station it wouldn't need to have routing capabilities and even if it did they should be turned off. Find out if you really need one first, what sort of signal strength do you get at your Mac and your Apple TV.

The placement of the modem could be an issue depending of the structure/materials of your house. I would ask a friend to lend me a wifi repeater to make sure.

Do home-sharing iTunes videos work?

If the answer is yes, then most probably the modem is not an issue as both iTunes and beam use the same protocol and the equipment is the same. iTunes sometimes succeeds where others fail as its developers didn't have to crack/guess the Airplay protocol.

xdabit wrote:

 

.......both iTunes and beam use the same protocol .....

I haven't even looked at this beamer product but I very much doubt that's the case.

Sir Winston,

According to wikipedia (not a definitive authority, some may argue), Beamer is a third party implementation of the Airplay protocol

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirPlay#Third-party_software_implementations

Furthermore netstat also reports that both iTunes and Beamer use TCP ports 3689 and 7000 (i.e daap and afs3-fileserver for audio and video respectively)

Your point is ?