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Airplay from Mac Pro not working ..?

Hi there


I can't figure out why I cant get my Apple TV to work with my Mac Pro ...

My ATV is a model A1427, software 7.2 (7512)

My Mac Pro is the Mid 2012

I cant see the Airplay icon in the menubar, though I have set my "Show mirroring options ..." in the Sys Prefs under Displays


What am I doing wrong here, or what am I missing out?

Hope someone knows, so I can move on in life ... :-)


Best from Jeppe

Mac Pro, OS X El Capitan (10.11), Mid 2012, 3.2 GHz, 32 GB DDR3 RAM

Posted on Oct 7, 2015 1:15 PM

Reply
9 replies

Oct 12, 2015 3:30 AM in response to jeppe k

jeppe k wrote:


I am sorry, but I really dont get the picture here!

My Mac Pro does not support AirPlay, only audio not video?

It's a mid 2012 Pro, is it too old for AirPlay??

If I buy the latest ATV, I can still not watch videos?


The original form of AirPlay was solely to enable streaming audio from a Mac to a device like either the Apple TV or an AirPort Express. Later on Apple enhanced things so that newer Macs could also stream video to an Apple TV as well as audio. However only Macs with built-in H.264 accelerated video encoding by the CPU chip can do this. The Mac Pro 5,1 which includes your 2012 model is too old to have a CPU chip capable of this feature. So as it does not have a suitable CPU chip Apple do not allow it to do AirPlay video streaming. (It can still do audio only streaming.) It is probable that the Intel chip feature being used is what Intel call 'Quick Sync Video'.


There is however a third-party software program which does AirPlay video streaming in software and not using hardware acceleration. It works but because it is all done in software it needs far more of the available CPU performance of the Mac Pro and as a result either other programs get slowed down excessively or you might even find it is so slow the video cannot keep up. See http://www.airsquirrels.com/airparrot/


You can setup your 2012 Mac Pro to use iTunes Home Sharing and have the Apple TV play the video file from the Mac, you can also have the Apple TV play purchased videos directly from the iTunes Store. Or you can as mentioned try AirParrot with the possibility it might be too slow, this is more likely to struggle with 1920x1080 videos than standard TV resolution videos.

Airplay from Mac Pro not working ..?

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