ATV4 Airplay Video Choppy with MacBook Pro

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Level 1

39 points

ATV4 Airplay Video Choppy with MacBook Pro

Hi - I've done some research on this issue and a lot of people talk about going into QoS settings and disabling the WMM (???) or go under gaming settings (which I don't have). I have a Netgear Nighthawk X6 R8000 router with a 4th gen ATV and a 2013 MacBook Pro. The video is very choppy when I use Airplay on the ATV.

When I go into my admin settings on the router (Netgear genie) I see "Dynamic Qos" but no where under there is a setting to disable WMM. Below is the current setup under Dynamic QoS. Can someone help me figure out what I need to do because everyone says when they've made this change all is good.

- Enable Dynamic QoS (unchecked) - Should this be checked?

- Internet Bandwidth / Let Speedtest detect my internet bandwidth (checked)

- I want to define my own internet bandwidth (unchecked)

That's all I see under my Dynamic QoS options.

Thanks,

Paul

MacBook, Mac OS X (10.6.5), iPhone, iPad, Apple TV

Posted on Mar 10, 2018 11:22 AM

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Answer 1

Mar 10, 2018 1:18 PM in response to Paul Howard4

If you are the only network user when this choppy video happens (should be easy to test), then no amount of traffic shaping is going to solve this, and the problem lies elsewhere.

I think a 2013 Mac Book Pro may do 802.11ac Wi-Fi, which should be pretty fast on the 5GHz band.

Have you checked for interference with other networks in the neighborhood?

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Answer 2

Mar 10, 2018 12:37 PM in response to Paul Howard4

WMM (Wi-Fi Multimedia Quality of Service), on Wi-Fi routers that support it, allows “traffic related to multimedia” to take a higher priority (voice tops video, video tops data), thus their packets get delivered first. It is an enable/disable option, with not further refinement. However, it needs three criteria to be met: (1) Access point (router) must be WMM enabled; (2) Client (device) must be WMM enabled; (3) source application (software) must be WMM enabled. If the video is transported as-if it was regular data (quite possible), then it has no effect. If AirPlay does nothing with WMM, then it has no effect. If the Apple TV does nothing with WMM, then it has no effect. If the tvOS and/or tvOS app do nothing with WMM, then it has no effect.

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Answer 3

Paul Howard4 Author

Level 1

39 points

Mar 11, 2018 10:25 AM in response to Urquhart1244

I live in San Francisco so at any given time there are 15 other wifi networks right next to me.

Not sure if this plays a factor as well, but when I do connect my MacBook to ATV not only is the video choppy but when I move my cursor it's delayed, maybe by like 1/2 a second or so. Its not as synced as I would think it should be. Not sure if other people have that same issue. The ATV doesn't treat the TV like a true monitor where I see real-time reactions.

Lastly, when I use ATV from my iPhone X I have no issues at all. The choppiness goes away when watching video or interacting with my phone. So could that mean it's the MacBook that's creating the choppiness?

Thanks,

Paul

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Answer 4

vazandrew

Level 8

40,348 points

Mar 11, 2018 10:55 AM in response to Paul Howard4

That will happen when the network is unable to send the content fast enough, when you are mirroring it is sending out the full display over the LAN in real time. If you are just trying to view video it is often best to just use basic airplay as that will simply send the video directly to the Apple TV.

For Mirroring

For best performance, make sure no other activity is occurring (other streaming, web use, network backups etc)

Try your Apple TV on ethernet

Get a diagnostic report for your network from istumbler or similar. Look for signal strength, noise, nearby networks. Also check what channel the other networks are using, and try changing the channel on your router.

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ATV4 Airplay Video Choppy with MacBook Pro

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