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Apple TV (third generation): How can I prevent stutter / lag when using AirPlay mirroring?

I'm streaming my desktop from a 2011 MacBook Pro w/hi-res screen. Every 10-30 seconds the video pauses for up to 2 seconds. This is on a low traffic home wireless network.
6 Answers
Doug Benson
Doug Benson, Software management and development
Update March 2015:
IF your internet speed is sufficient to stream an iPhone or iPad video signal to your Apple TV *without* lag, but you see a lag or jitter when sending your MacBook Pro signal, you can improve or fix it by doing this:

On the MacBook display prefs, send the signal to your AppleTV. You already know how to do this since you asked about it before. Now your display is mirrored.

Change the setting from Mirror Desktop to Extend Desktop.
Now you have the Primary Display as your MacBook, and the Secondary Display as your Apple TV.
In the Display preferences on your MacBook, go to the Arrange tab, and drag the white 'menu bar' (horizontal white rectangle in the Display Preferences) from your Primary Display over to your Secondary Display (still in the Display preferences. You're dragging the little white rectangle between the two gray rectangles that represent your two screens).

At this point, your Apple TV should now be the primary display. If you use your trackpad to navigate over to it, you can launch your browser and it'll launch on your TV. If you go to fullscreen, the TV will get the full-screen signal, rather than your Laptop + TV. You can even turn the brightness of your Mac down to nothing at this point, and not even drive its display.

Now, assuming that the lag was caused by the processing power of the device, rather than your internet throughput, you should see a whole lot less lag.

Ta daaaa!




I've seen the same problem. It's not AirPlay per se, it's the MacBook Pro. AirPlay streaming from an iPhone or iPad work beautifully to the AppleTV, presumably because they're not also mirroring to the screen.

Using Apple's solution I'm not aware of any method to get a non-stuttering display from an older MacBook Pro (not sure if a brand new one has the same issue). I don't believe it's a problem of wifi throughput. I think it's the fact that the display is mirrored rather than only sent over AirPlay (as with the iOS devices).

Perhaps this is better in Yosemite; I haven't tried.
Bjørn van Raaij
Bjørn van Raaij, Service and product designer
While developing Porthole for Mac (audio streaming to AirPlay devices) we encountered many stuttering issues with AirPlay of audio. If possible we advice our users to set their network to n (5GHz) mode. This drastically improves bandwidth and reach. This might work for you too.

(Since the latter isn't supported by iPhone/iPad the latest AirPort Express has a double (2,5 and 5 GHz) mode.)

I would set the wireless router to the 5 gigaHertz mode.  you can also have the 2.5 Ghz one on as well. with the wireless setting there should be a maximum bandwith setting. 300MB per second for 2.5GHz and 400MB/sec for the 5GHz one with the channel selection on both to auto.

If you still have issues then:

If you have something like a netgear router ( other routers also support QoS (Quality of Service) settings.  with netgear click the advanced tab under setup. you can enable WMM (Wi-Fi multimedia) settings. There are also some other settings like enabling Internet QoS. There might be a setting for QOS priority list. If you set the router to assign you devices to a static address. Read the router manual to do this most consumer routers make doing this easy under the advanced settings.

Then you can put your devices like the appleTV and your laptop as the top on the QoS priority list.

Your router will give priority to multimedia traffic (like games or other network hogs, like video). If the router support a QoS list then doing the extra steps to assign IP addresses and adding them to the priority list insures that those devices come first.

I hope this helps

Doug Trickey
Doug Trickey, Expert user. Happens to prefer iPads, iPhones and Macs. Also knows Windows.

Though I don't have first-hand experience, I understand that the app Beamer for the Mac does an excellent job streaming to Apple TV and Chromecast. It does cost $20 and requires Mac OS X version 10.10 (AKA "Yosemite"). You can try it out before you buy.

Get Beamer here:  Beamer – Stream video files from your Mac to Apple TV and Chromecast

A review:

Beamer 2 review: Drag and drop to stream any video to an Apple TV

David Kaplan
David Kaplan, Huge fan but also extremely knowledgeable about everything Apple.
One easy way to do it is to just stream the video to the TV without mirroring the entire computer screen and putting it into full screen. You can push the video to the TV by turning on Airplay but turning off mirroring. Hope that helps improve speeds!
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