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how to turn on airplay on mac

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macbook issues booting up I have a mid 2011 imac that is not connecting to a 3rd generation apple tv (slightly more than a year old). It used to connect just fine for a year or so, and then stopped. It MAY have occurred when I installed McAfee Internet security, but am not sure. I followed the protocol of the above 9 steps and turned off & on the router, and it still doesn’t work. The strange thing is that my ipad and MacBook Pro connect just fine, but the apple tv icon does not show up on my imac. When I try to access my imac from the apple tv, it tells me that no itunes home computer is found and to turn on itunes sharing (which is already turned on). Any thoughts? THANKS for your time!

Sorry to say it’s a problem of the hardware in your iMac. AirPlay (what you use for screen-sharing) requires higher-end graphics capability that just wasn’t available back in 2008, so even if the MacOS software is capable of AirPlay, your hardware isn’t. Not to get too technical, but video streaming requires some fancy compression and encoding when sending from one screen to another, and that requires some serious graphics power. Photos and music don’t require that higher-end graphics processing capability. For “other files”, the Apple TV is not a real computer, so it can’t run the software needed to work with other types of files such as documents, spreadsheets and presentations. All the Apple TV can do is show your iMac’s screen using AirPlay so you can see it on your TV. So the only way for an Apple TV to deal with other files is with AirPlay screen-sharing, where you’d see on your TV what’s displayed on your iMac. If it was just a picture, it wouldn’t be a problem, but moving your cursor around and clicking on icons, etc. generate motion video. The Apple TV was designed around media display, so it can use streaming technology in limited ways to get the less-complicated music and photos from your iMac. For any other streaming, you’d use the apps on the Apple TV and stream directly from the source – Netflix, etc. Those sources would do the heavy lifting of compressing and encoding the video to stream to your Apple TV numberforsupport.

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