Mirror your Mac’s display with AirParrot
1
Connect to the Apple TV
After installing the app, its icon will appear in the menu bar. If you have an Apple TV device on your wireless network, it should appear under the Devices section in the menu. Click on the Apple TV device and your Mac should begin mirroring the desktop to your connected TV.
2
Extend your desktop
The Display section shows information about connected displays and built-in screens. If you choose Extend Desktop, your TV will become part of the desktop, at a higher resolution in our case, above. You should be able to move the cursor from your Mac screen to the TV.
3
Extend just one app
If you move to the option called ‘Specific App’, you’ll be able to send an app’s window to the Apple TV and thus to your television, and leave your Mac’s desktop working as normal. This is ideal for sending a presentation or slideshows to a screen while still working on your Mac.
4
Choose a document to mirror
AirParrot will only send an app to your TV when that app has a window open on the screen. If the app is hidden or has no open windows, it won’t appear. With some apps onscreen, click on the Specific App option and you’ll see you can choose specific open documents to send to the TV.
5
Install the audio driver
Any sound you play will come out of your Mac and not the connected TV. To change this, go to Enable Audio. The first time you do this, you will be prompted to install the driver and restart your Mac. Once done, clicking Enable Audio will stream the sound from your Mac to your Apple TV.
6
Tweak the quality and data rate
In the AirParrot menu, go to the Preferences option to open the preferences window. If you get choppy streaming experiment with lowering the video quality and framerates. Bear in mind that dropping the framerate too far will cause streamed video to become hard to watch.
7
Stretch apps to fill the TV
In the Preferences menu is the option to force the streamed output to 720p resolution if streaming to a thirdgeneration Apple TV at 1080p is slow. You can also stretch apps during streaming to fill the Apple TV screen, if the aspect ratio of two screens initially mismatch.
8
Tweak for presentation mode
The final options are compatibility mode, which helps fix glitches on some OS X 10.6-based systems, and the option to hide the Notification Centre in the streamed signal. This is important if you’re giving a presentation. You can also hide the mouse cursor here, if you wish.