Comment by pwthornton | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pwthornton | Hacker News Reader

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The thing I'm by far the most excited about is AirPlay Mirroring. If I'm reading this correctly, I'll be able to mirror anything from my Mac to my TV using an Apple TV. This will be great for watching Internet videos, going through my iPhoto library with my wife, looking at home videos, etc. All without needing a stupid cable from my couch to my TV.

The deeper iCloud integration is also intriguing. I assume this means proper syncing between documents on a Mac, iPad and iPhone. This will be a huge feature, and is currently a major stumbling block with iCloud. I want my documents to sync to my mobile devices.

Those two features alone are pretty big. Beyond that, I'm interested to here about the new APIs and anything else that has been changed under the hood.

OS X Lion has always been a little bit buggy (the latest release is pretty solid, however). I wonder if Mountain Lion will be like Snow Leopard where it tightens up a lot of things under the hood and gives us a better realization of the OS.

I'm excited for Gatekeeper for my parents and other people I know that aren't that tech savvy. This could save me a lot of headaches.

And that's the point the Apple TV goes from a hobby to a major product.

Spending a £1000 on a Mac - I reckon another £100 for an Apple TV with that functionality as the hook is a pretty easy up sell.

It is unfortunate that AppleTV's video output (out-of-the-box) still does not support true 1080p resolutions and everything is upscaled from 720p.

I expect to see a 1080p Apple TV this year, since the A5 and upcoming A6 can both do 1080p video. The current Apple TV is A4 based, which is limited to 720p. With the new iPad having a resolution above 1080p, Apple finally has a reason to have 1080p iTunes content.

Beyond that, Apple may not have wanted to take A5 chips away from the iPhone and iPad to sell in Apple TVs. Now that all of the new iPads and iPhones will be A6 based this year, Apple will have more supply of A5s for other devices.

None of this helps people who already own an Apple TV, however

Prediction: Apple is the company that takes TV past 1080p into much higher resolution displays (when they actually release an Apple TV). Movies are already shot at much higher resolution, and Apple will introduce Apps (subscribe to a show or network, for example).

If that happens, then I predict the end of all-you-can-eat Internet. ISPs are kvetching enough about Netflix as-is.

And hopefully after that, GoogleISP will launch on all of their dark fiber.

I will buy a new one. :)

The iTunes Store only supports 720p right now anyway, so in the Apple ecosystem it doesn't make sense to worry about 1080p. I imagine this will change soon though. (A5 based AppleTV + iTunes Store upgrades)

This may be a bandwidth issue. I remember my friend having major issues streaming 1080 to his tv box over wifi. He had to get an N router just to support it. This may be a compromise.

Blu-Ray tops out at 48Mbit, and ATSC is less than half that. Your friend was most likely having signal quality issues, not bandwidth issues.

word on the street is that will change before summer.

I would disagree. Neat as Airplay is, it isn't going to move Apple TVs.

Apps and/or Content deals with video distributors (Comcast/Verizon/etc) are going to be where it turns the corner. I suspect the whole hobby has been in a holding pattern while Apple has tried to line up the content deals and that the fallback plan is to just enable Apps and let the chips fall where they may. [1]

That's probably even the stick they'll use to get the cable companies to the table: Either they sign up and get preferential treatment in the interface, or they get shoved into being a dumb IP pipe that much faster.

[1] Delaying as the internals for an Apple-quality, app-running, 1080p set-top box get cheaper and cheaper hasn't hurt, I'm sure.

I don't know how many purchases it will really drive. You can do all those those things with an Apple TV and an iPhone today, and almost all of them with just an Apple TV.

I am excited as well in AirPlay Mirroring so i watched several times in the demo. It seems video plays with Quicktime. So lot's of video formats are not compatible like mkv's, iso's etc...

If somehow i am able to mirror VLC i will run and buy Apple TV at once.

If you install Perian, Quicktime supports expands to include many more formats http://perian.org/

But I agree and would welcome the support for VLC too!

Perian has never worked for me. I can't get Xvid or MKVs to play in QT. VLC is the only player I've found for OS X that actually plays everything.

I already have Perian. It's not supported well imho. Just try to open a 8gb mkv and it broke QT.

It didn't break Qt, it broke Perian.

That being said, I've got a couple of 8GB MKV's and they all work perfectly. So caveat emptor and all that ... :P

lot's of video formats are not compatible

This will airplay pretty much everything you throw at it: http://beamer-app.com

thanks, didn't know this one. If only it could play burned dvd's like ISO files.

Still, VLC integration is a must. With no compromise.

From what I can see it's just screen sharing isn't it? Play something in VLC in fullscreen and you're fine. They use Quicktime for the demo because it's an Apple product but I don't believe it's a limitation.

If Apple have to throw Quicktime under the bus to sell more Apple TVs and Macs I think they'll happily do it.

What you are saying is true, however it is a rather messy solution. Assuming that the next AppleTV will support 1080p output you could not just mirror your screen to get the best quality. The source film is in 1080p, gets scaled down to screen res. which is transmitted to the AppleTV and then gets scaled up to 1080p again - resulting in a easily visible quality loss.

I hope they treat the screen as a "second screen" which is mirrored...

This says it will display whatever is on your screen, but if you're using itunes, drm will kick in.

http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/16/2801047/mac-os-x-10-8-moun...

Looking at Apple's page, it seems like it doesn't only mirror output of apps such as Quicktime, but is able to do desktop mirroring, so you can play videos in VLC and mirror the entire screen.

Just last night I found a post on TUAW about something called AirParrot (http://www.airparrot.com), which provides similar functionality. I've been looking for something like that for a while, so jumped at the chance to download it (cost me $9.99). It's in beta, and the developer makes no secret of that. It does not pipe audio, and has a few other quirks but I managed to: run a powerpoint presentation, run civilization v, and play some youtube videos from my machine to my appletv. I have no affiliation with the developer, but i must say - to pwthornton's point above, it's pretty effing cool to airplay out of your mac. I bet the official release from apple will be that much better too.

I would like AirPlay mirroring the other way around too -- let my iPad / iPhone cast to my Mac. Very useful for presentations and iOS product demos.

I am most excited about AirPlay Mirroring as well. However, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple pulls some BS like it only works with 2012 Macs.

From a work perspective, this will be an awesome feature. We currently have a heap of screens with "Wireless Presenter" software running on them which isn't that easy to get going.

AirPlay Mirroring sounds like it could be a solution for that provided you could choose the Apple TV you wanted to connect to (There'd be at least 200 screens in my office).

A minor warning: I installed Mountain Lion yesterday on my 1+ year MacBook Pro (core 2 duo, not i5 or i7) and Air Play doesn't seem to work - no icon on menu bar. This makes sense because i5 has some instructions for better video compression. Hopefully older Macs will be supported as the software is tweaked. Otherwise, I like Mountain Lion.

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