Apple may have surprised the Mac residential district with its announcement of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion on Thursday , but you ’ll have to await until this summer to upgrade . Until then , you could emulate one of Mountain Lion ’s upcoming new lineament thanks to an diligence calledAirParrot . AirParrot is a utility program that mirrors your Mac ’s display on an HDTV with Apple TV via Apple ’s AirPlay technology . Since AirParrot works with Mac OS X 10.6 ( Snow Leopard ) and 10.7 ( Lion ) , you may use it now — however , Apple ’s AirPlay Mirroring will be build correctly in to Mountain Lion , and perform the same function .
As report byTUAW , the app make for by encode your display ’s image as H.264 video , then send that to an Apple TV on the same wireless meshwork . It ’s essentially a real - time screen capture , which is a cagy way of mirror the display , but it sacrifices look-alike calibre due to the information compressing required . It will be interesting to see how AirPlay Mirroring equate in this regard .
There are a few other caveats with the current variant of AirParrot to be cognisant of . For one , it only endure video — no audio is broadcasted via AirPlay . However , AirParrot ’s developers say this will be added in a future update . Also , DRM - enfold videos from iTunes wo n’t play through AirParrot . To work around this , you have to display the video through the iTunes carrying out of AirPlay instead .
Although Apple is incorporate a exchangeable characteristic in its newest operating system , this does n’t render AirParrot obsolete . AirParrot still has a few advantages that make it worthwhile — compatibility with Snow Leopard and Lion , and support for a extensive chain of mountains of computers . Apple say that AirPlay Mirroring in Mountain Lion will require Macs with a second - coevals Intel Core processor , while AirParrot simply recommends Nvidia or Intel HD graphics chipsets for optimal results . Plus , you may protrude using AirParrot today — there ’s no indigence to waitress for Mountain Lion .
AirParrot is readily availableand be $ 10 for a single permit or $ 30 for 5 license . It requires Mac OS X 10.6 or 10.7 and a 2nd - coevals Apple TV .
