And unless you have a high-powered machine, the conversion process could take quite a while (several hours or more). Handbrake will be able to work with MPEG2 and VC-1 encoded movies, and can give you a smaller file, but because it's transcoding, the PQ will decrease somewhat. Filesize should be about the same as the original, too. If it's MP4, Subler should be fast, and PQ will be as good as the origin Blu-ray rip. Subler will maintain the same PQ as the source, but requires that you're working with a movie that was encoded as MPEG4 (which most movies are, but two other Blu-ray encoding methods exist: VC-1 and MPEG2, and you won't be able to use Subler with those). Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe that any of the on-the-fly transcoding options (e.g., Air Video, Plex) support maintaining the 5.1 audio, so if that's important to you, your best option is to convert the MKV files ahead of time using something like Handbrake or Subler. Overall I'm happy with my purchase of iFlicks and have a lot of movie and tv show files in AppleTV compatible format, but it may not be the best solution for everyone. There is the inconvenience of having the laptop showing the movie while it's also showing on the TV. This allows both video and audio to go through one cable, and works well.

One end is the mini-display adaptor and the other end is HDMI. The other option that I use is to plug a cable between a Macbook air and the TV. However I've had problems with screen resolution formatting using airplay mirroring, so don't think it's a great solution for playing movies. I'm guessing (though I haven't tried it) that mirroring should show whatever is on the screen of your iPad rather than interpreting and playing a specific movie file. For most MKV is doesn't need to reencode the video file, it just puts a new wrapper around it, so the conversion is quick and the file is AppleTV friendly.Īnother option that may work is to try Airplay mirroring from your iPad or iPhone to AppleTV. The easiest I have found is to use iFlicks, which converts the file into AppleTV compatible format. Presumably this is because the airplay system is not converting the video file into an AppleTV-compatible format. In my experience AppleTV is expecting to receive compatible files to play via airplay, so sending files with VLC, AV Player HD, etc.

How to airplay from mac vlc