by I know more than a few people who connect an older Mac to their TV, using various audio and video cables, to play videos. Most of these people would love to instead stream those videos wirelessly to an Apple TV, but their Macs aren’t new enough to support Apple’s AirPlay technology and the AirPlay mirroring feature of Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8). Sometimes they stream video using iTunes, but they also have video files in formats iTunes doesn’t support.
Unless Apple works some unexpected magic with OS X, older Macs will never get official AirPlay-mirroring capabilities. And I don’t expect iTunes to start supporting more video formats any time soon. But thanks to the $15 Beamer, AirPlay streaming is still possible. This simple app lets you stream videos from older (and newer) Macs to a 2nd- or 3rd-generation Apple TV. Specifically, Beamer works with 64-bit Intel Macs (any model from 2007 or later, along with some 2006 Macs) running OS X 10.6 or later.
Launch Beamer, and its window shows all compatible Apple TVs on your local network. Choose one, and Beamer instructs you to drop a movie file into the Beamer window; a few seconds later, the movie starts playing on the chosen Apple TV. (One feature I’d like to see is queued playback, so I could drop a group of videos onto Beamer and have them play back in order.)
Beamer’s window on your Mac while streaming to an Apple TV
Beamer streams the video to your Apple TV just as if you’d streamed it from iTunes: full-screen, with a progress bar whenever you pause playback or use the forward or rewind controls. In fact, you can use your Apple TV’s remote to control playback—you don’t need to do so from your Mac. If your video file includes subtitles (or is paired with a subtitles file) in MicroDVD, SSA/ASS, SubRip (SRT), or SubViewer formats, Beamer can display those subtitles during playback, although you can’t adjust the size or font.
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