HT201335 The airplay mirroring is not working on Mountain Loin.

Question

The airplay mirroring is not working. The AirPlay mirroring box states "No devices Detected" and will not let you select anything else. The Apple tv is updated and I have a MacBook Pro (Oct 2011)

Answer 1

Rob
I don't disagree with much of what you are thinking/feeling, and many others too I dare say.
I do mention Airparrot but usually (not above) with some reservation saying some users report good things some others don't.  There is after all a demo and people should try that.
There is a big technical difference between Airplay from iTunes and Airplay mirroring.  The former simply has to send a preformatted h264 video stream (i.e. a file in the iTunes media library) to AppleTV across the LAN - there is no processing of this stream required, and AppleTV does the decoding.  The latter involves generating that stream live from individual video frames and also then streaming to AppleTV.
Apple seem to have gone for a hardware encoding solution for the stream using post 2011 Intel chip features detailed here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quick_Sync_Video
They also seem to have decided not to offer a software solution for older processors - this is what grates - Airparrot clearly shows that many people can get acceptable performance on many earlier machines.
There are many many examples of instances where Apple has abandoned support for or left out features on older hardware - either playing safe avoiding underperformance or maybe something else.....
When there are genuine reasons not to support things that's fine.  When it's ambiguous customers get upset and might take their money elsewhere for future purchases.  Apple need to be careful as in the current climate things are pretty tight financially for most people, and they are not in the habit of replacing computers as often as mobile phones - I think the phone business model is clearly partly at fault.
AC