Friday, March 7, 2014

Reflector airplay receiver review. Turns your PC into an Airplay device.

Reflector (Airplay receiver) 
brought to you by the same company (Squirrels...yes that is their name)  that made AirParrot (see below).

About a year ago I bought AirParrot.  I had an older Mac without AirPlay.  I was trying to find a way to stream my Mac to my Apple TV my school's cafe as a way of showing a Keynote show of the school's announcements, it worked perfectly!!!  

Now we have iPads and Apple TV for our staff to use, yet some of them want to keep their PC because they have LOTS of lessons on their hard drive, network drive, flash disk, etc.  Sooo the good folks at Squirrels have made an app that lets you AirPlay an iPad, iPhone, to a PC and then to whatever projection unit you have connected to the PC...all for around $13(US).  

I tried it today, the installation went fine and my iPad could see my PC in it's AirPlay menu.  The only issue was that when I went to mirror my iPad to the PC it connected but did not mirror for about 5 seconds than disconnected.  After looking on Squirrels website, they suggested to set the default resolution for the Reflector application at the standard iPhone setting of 320 X 480, et voila!  We were in business! The reason we had to set it to a lower resolution was because our networks lack of bandwidth, so I suggest setting at the standard iPhone setting to see if it works, and then moving the resolution higher and seeing if your network can handle it.  You are also able to have Reflector work "full-screen".  IMHO another gem of a nut by Squirrels!!