Mirroring an iPad with iOS 5 & Apple TV

By Wesley Fryer On October 31, 2011 · · 3 Comments

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Today at The Apple Store in Oklahoma City I had my first chance to play with the “mirroring” features of Apple’s new iOS 5 on an iPad and Apple TV. Wow. I’m impressed.

When everything is setup, the Apple TV mirrors EVERYTHING on the iPad. The frame rate for games is even pretty decent. With this feature, Apple will likely cause many schools to purchase Apple TVs in upcoming months. This appears to be the most seamless way to share iPad content wirelessly with a class. Being untethered has BIG benefits over using a cable and iPad VGA connector, which “tethers” the presenter to the front of the room.

To get this setup to work, you’ll need an iOS device running iOS 5 and an Apple TV connected to a TV with HDMI. (Obviously that’s not the standard video port in most K-12 classrooms today.) Double click the home button and swipe left to show the volume controls and alignment lock options. ~~If you have the same Apple ID entered on your iOS device and the Apple TV,~~ An option to share with Airplay should show up. Click to turn on mirroring, and it’s showtime.

Unlike Airplay for videos there does not seem to be a guest mirroring option yet. This is good from the standpoint that others (like students) can’t readily hijack an Apple TV via mirroring. Other than entering a shared Apple ID on the student device, however, I’m not sure how a teacher could mirror/share student iOS devices on an Apple TV. Is there “an app for that” yet?

Update: Dean Shareski reports mirroring via Apple TV does NOT require a common Apple ID.

I’m glad to see this iOS 5 / Apple TV option “in action” personally. This has me thinking a lot about implications for watching live sports over the holidays via MobiTV, since we don’t subscribe to a cable provider any more. For more on my experiences with this in December 2010, see my post, “Watching Live Bowl Games on MobileTV.”

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On this day..

http://ideasandthoughts.org Dean Shareski

Wes,

I did a workshop on Friday with 40 principals with ipad2. We set up an Apple TV and everyone could mirror as long as they were on the same network as the Apple TV. Whoever mirrors last, has the screen. It worked really well. Most participants were on the hotel wireless and just had to change their connection to mirror. We had to fiddle somewhat with the Apple TV color settings to get it to look right on a VGA projector. We had a few different cable converters to make it work but it did work well.

No need for a special app.
http://wfryer.wpengine.com Wesley Fryer

That’s great to hear, Dean! So were the iPads everyone was using all configured in advance with the same Apple ID? From what the Apple Store rep told me today, it sounded like that was a required step.
http://ryancollins.org/ Ryan Collins

We are testing this out with an HDMI to VGA convertor (learned about it from IEAR: http://eduk8.me/LfMMMm). You don’t have to use the same Apple ID to mirror, in fact, we haven’t even put in an Apple ID on the Apple TV. You can set a password, so only people with the password can connect to the Apple TV.

The latest rumor is that Apple is looking at adding Airplay to OS X Lion, so you would be able to share your OS X screen wirelessly. That would be very sweet!