Playing With The Apple Tv : Steam For Mac
Hi golden leopard, Mac + Link user here. It's certainly better now than it was on day one, but if you want a flawless experience after opening the box then you should probably keep waiting. On a wired connection, graphics performance is as advertised. I can't speak to audio because I have an admittedly bad system, but audio from the game comes out of my TV with little to no latency. Things start getting hairy with controllers. Xbox 360 controllers currently don't work as advertised when plugged directly into the Link.
I'm also running into weird issues with any game that requires mouse input forcing the cursor to be always present on screen. The Steam Controller works, but has acted up recently. Aparently this has been patched, but I've yet to test. Ultimately, it's come a long way in 2 months. When it arrived on my doorstep on 10/15/15, it was a paperweight. Now, I can play games on it with some frustrations and workarounds.
Is it perfect? Do I feel entirely confident it will be ready for primetime in a few months? Do with that what you will.
I'm happy to answer any questions. I'm using steam link + steam controller on a mac pro. Well, some games work great, but many have issues. Often the mouse courser is present on the TV even it's hidden on the monitor and the game does not require a mouse. But the mouse curser is always in the middle of the screen, so at least you can use it to aim:-) - It happens that games to not respond to controller input.
Switching back and forth and reconfigure the controller works, but in some cases the game does not respond to the controller input at all and you need to get up and restart it from the Mac directly. For some games, the recommended controller setup does not work. I belive this is not mac specific. Some games crash for weird reasons.
'Thief' crashes once I bind shift (sprint) to any controller key. Sprinting from the keyboard works fine. Sprinting with the controller leads the game to quit instantly. I had similiar issues in two other games.
I think there should be a troubleschooting mode where the controller just emulates the regular system mouse and a full keyboard (where key combinations can be pressed). Then it would be possible to kill (cmd+q) and restart a game without haveing to leave the couch. So right now I would not say that it is really an alternative to a playstation or xbox when used on a mac. I still don't regret it as there are working games and then it's quite fun. Finally arrived, hooked it and would not recognise ps3 controller plugged in but worked with xbox one controller, installed an update and two drivers on mac and worked fine! Started playing portal which i had complete hassle trying to get working with my ps3 controller on my mac, on the link it needed some fiddling but got going.
Control Apple Tv From Mac
Playwise was good no lagging (our internet is terrible and the link was plugged into the router for this) and was playable until my mac played up. Steam runs in big picture mode and my mac kept sliding the screen upwards so you would see the desktop on the link? And no sound comes from the link via hdmi only the mac also cursor stays prominently on in the center of the screen?
SWF format originated with FutureWave Software, then transferred to Macromedia, and is currently Adobe product. F4v player for mac. It is a very popular Flash media file format widely used for Flash animation based on vector & raster graphics, as well as for Flash menus, buttons, banners.
Disapears on the mac but just appears there when on the link? The PS3 controller is not supported wirelessly on the link. However, wired works. It also works when you pair it with the computer and not with link - but then you need another controller on the link to start the stream / the game. I've read that the PS4 controlles should work via bluetooth with the link. Yes, the cursor thingy is very annoying.
I brought that up in another thread and reported it as bug. It seems to be known and happen to all users on the mac. I do not have any sound problems using HDMI. It 'just works'. But I've read about some issues with 5.1 sound.
Mac Mini As Apple Tv
Not sure if this is affecting you. Steam link is indeed just a very fast way to stream what is displayed on the desktop. You can also minimize steam big picture and play video - I think this is pretty cool and works a lot better than airplay. Links is more or less a remote control tool.
So you can also have fancy effects if you have active corners configured. For example expose when moving the mouse into the top left corner. Whatever happens with the mouse on the computer might happen using the steamlink and the controller. It seems like they're working very hard to get these things sorted out. I have beta update (yes, switch to steam and link beta!) almost every 3-4 days. Everytime with a quite good list of improvements (not necessarily affecting mac issues, but you can see that there's a lot going on).
That answer doesn't seem right to me, at least for the newer Apple TV. Apple TV has 'mirroring' capability, which lets you mirror what is displayed on your device/mac on your TV via the apple TV.
I have used this to successfully view ipad games on the TV. To stream/mirror your PC screen on the TV via apple TV, there seem to be apps out there (e.g. Run you game on PC, mirror the screen on your TV via something like AirParrot, done. I guess your controller would have to still be connected to your PC, but if you can do a wifi controller. I gotta say, I just tried streaming for the first time an hour ago and Im blown away ^^ Seems like witchcraft is at play o.O My game PC runs pretty much anything at 1600p, I ran a few titles on a macbook air (dont know spec, does it matter? They're all crap).
Wireless N, ran perfect!! I then mirrored to TV via the appleTV and Im so impressed with how it ran. Im fairly sure the res was sub 1080p (thanks to whatever the macbook air runs at), but the point is - it was happy to take the 1600p (I must assume it scales it down before broadcasting??!) Think Ill put together a mini box so I can get 1080p, should be sweet. E/(Also, stuck in my 360 receiver into the macbook and thankfully someone had a driver for it. Worked perfectly. Only for the sub 1080p, Id otherwise actually be happy to game like that).