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Comment by digitalsushi | Hacker News Reader

The singular improvement I have been waiting for is using an airplay device as a second monitor.

I have a macbook pro and I hook in with my thunderbolt->DVI connector to get my big monitor.

I can throw an appletv onto the monitor with an hdmi->DVI connection and finally go cordless! This is an improvement that means something real to me!

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Apple TV with Airplay in theory is awesome for presentations. I've setup Apple TV on a bunch of LED screens for a client, with the intention of using Airplay for displaying presentations from Macbooks. So far, the solution has been close to useless. The lag is unbearable, even for simply actions like changing webpages and PPT pages. In the end, users end up going back to HDMI or even Thunderbolt to DVI/VGA connectors for presentations. To make it worse, it seems that different versions of OS X will give a variety of glitchy behavior on Airplay.

This probably has something to do with your network setup. I've been able to get the lag down sufficiently that some games are playable, though I'd never recommend playing a twitch-based FPS over Airplay.

For me what really made a difference was to ensure that only the laptop was connected to my network via wifi. My Apple TV is connected using ethernet. Before I made that change, I experienced significant lag, but now the lag is perceptible but pretty low.

YMMV, of course.

AirParrot has done this for a while. Nice additional feature not included in Mavericks: you can send just one specific application window to the appletv.

unfortunately you can't run it on case-sensitive filesystems (which is how I like my filesystems)

If it's anything like the current offering, mirroring via AirPlay to an Apple TV, it will be useless. There's a very noticeable lag. OK for presentations but as a a second monitor it would be dysfunctional unless they put in a lot of latency work. I hope they have.

I always love the use of the word "useless" on this site. "Ok for presentations" means it has an obvious use: presentations. How can that be useless? I'd agree it can be better, but it's obviously not without a use.

I specifically said useless for dual-screen setups in response to the comment I was replying to. I too find un-analytical praise or criticism annoying. I hope I wasn't doing it.

Just tried using airplay as a second display on my prev-gen Apple TV (black puck but 720p) and new MBA. Works fine but noticeable lag that makes mousing nasty. You probably don't want to use this for a "real" interactive display. Maybe the newer ATV would be faster, but I wouldn't expect too much.

"This just in, network latency is slower than USB->PCB latency; more on this as it develops"

Depending on the USB input device, that's not necessarily true at all. You could very easily find crappy USB input devices with greater latency than your ping to the news.ycombinator.com server, unless you're in Antarctica or something. There's at least one John Carmack twitter rant about ping to Europe being better than latency from some USB input device.

If you're a single router hop away from something the latency can be imperceptible. Whatever trouble is involved here isn't down to network latency.

I thought readers might appreciate a report from an actual end-to-end test. There's a huge usability difference between 15msec and 150msec latency. I observed the wrong end of that range.

FWIW, I think video stream buffering is the culprit rather than inherent channel latency.

Yes. Add airplay to generic monitors and you've got a solution for enterprises. (Do you know of such a product?)

All of our conference rooms have a wall mounted LCD with a shitty Windows box driving it. Best we can do now is screen sharing with Skype or join.me.

Most of our Mac users just plug into the monitor directly. We'd LOVE to have an untethered solution.

You can hook up an AppleTV to a big screen TV (which is typically what conference rooms have)

Thanks. I'll pick one up, see what's what. (I don't have TV.)

Apple TV can do this for you.

But only at 720p. Enough for presentations but terrible as a second monitor.

We have Mac Minis attached to our TVs. And infuriatingly, you can't use OS X as an AirPlay target, only as a source. I'd love to see that change, but don't see any mention of it in Mavericks.

> * And infuriatingly, you can't use OS X as an AirPlay target, only as a source*

Have you looked at AirServer? http://www.airserver.com

Yeah, we may well end up using it, but it just seems like an annoyance to pay for something like that.

Also, we have an issue with the TV computers not being on the same subnet as wifi'd laptops, so they don't appear through Bonjour. But that's a whole other issue for enterprise that Apple doesn't really touch.

One benefit AirServer has over any of Apple's AirPlay implementations to date is that it supports 1080p rather than just 720p like the Apple TV when receiving data from an iPad or iPhone. I specifically have an Apple TV + AirServer hooked up to a wall-mounted screen instead of an Apple TV just for this reason.

We also have Mac Minis attached to TVs, but we use http://www.airserver.com/ to turn them into AirPlay targets.

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