I have an old AppleTV v3. Most of its streaming apps are no longer usable, but I can still use it as an AirPlay receiver, for streaming video from phones and laptops over my home Wi-Fi.
But here’s a question. I am thinking that it might be useful to take with me while traveling so I can plug it into a hotel TV and stream from my laptop without needing to keep the laptop next to the TV (it’s inconvenient to work the controls from the bed, where I’m watching the programming).
But I really don’t want to have to connect the ATV to the hotel Wi-Fi. It wouldn’t be receiving data from the Internet (although my laptop or phone would be), and I would expect (incorrectly?) that the hotel’s Wi-Fi would have some kind of firewalling so my two devices won’t be able to talk to each other over it anyway.
Is there a good solution? Would it be possible, perhaps, for the two devices to communicate over an Ad-Hoc Wi-Fi connection? But if I do that, can the laptop also use the hotel Wi-Fi for receiving its streams? I assume Bluetooth wouldn’t have enough bandwidth for video.
Just a thought. I may have to just give it a try and see what happens…
You probably want to connect the ATV to the TV via an HDMI cable. I don’t think it will connect via WiFi. You have to hope there is an HDMI connector on the TV. Most TV’s in the past many years have an HDMI connector.
I don’t know how you can AirPlay from your device to the ATV without WiFi, unless you can connect to it via Ethernet. I don’t know if ATVv3 has an Ethernet port.
Sorry. I thought it would be assumed that I’ll be using HDMI from the ATV to the TV.
There is an Ethernet port, but my laptop doesn’t have one, so that’s not an option.
I assume that this will only be able to work if the laptop can connect to Wi-Fi and to an ad-hoc network (to the ATV) at the same time. Which might be possible, since that is how (I think) AirDrop works (Bluetooth to discover targets, then ad-hoc Wi-Fi for data transfer).
You can get a Thunderbolt or USB-C to Ethernet adaptor inexpensively, either from Apple or a generic one. Depends if you’re willing to carry around an Ethernet cable, but that might be a good fallback given the vagaries of public WiFi.
Apple seems to say that both your laptop/iPhone and ATV must be connected to the same wifi to use Airplay:
But a hotel wifi is not necessary…
If you simply want to stream videos that are already on your Mac/iPhone (eg “downloaded”) then just set up Airplay without wifi:
I think that tip also works with Macs.
Using an iPad instead of an ATV
During a recent trip I connected my iPad directly to hotel TVs with an HDMI and adapter. This mostly worked but I found some TVs would not play some protected content (eg Apple TV+).
It would have been useful if I could have remotely controlled the iPad with my iPhone but it seems Apple has never facilitated that.
I did come across 2 hotel TVs that actually supported airplay and I used this feature. Being in Japan at the time it was not easy to find out how to do this. In one case I was scrolling HDMI inputs and a (Japanese) message with the word Airplay appeared. I started Airplay on my phone (connected to the hotel wifi) and the TV showed up. Pure luck!
Not sure it’s still in play for @Shamino’s case, but for years I carried an Ethernet cable on a retractable reel. The cable ends pull out from the reel, and when you are done you simply release them and the spring-loaded reel pulls them back in.
As an example, Cable Matters distributes these. Amazon sells them as a 2-pack for under US$10.
I’ll just add that my own experience staying in hotels with these is that, even if they have an Ethernet jack in the room, if they offer WiFi the Ethernet jack is usually dead.
I have never used AppleTV, so I’m shooting in the dark here.
I think you’re saying that you require the laptop to connect to the hotel Wi-Fi.
Although the quoted article emphasizes that this works “even when offline”, I get the impression that the laptop must be offline. The article explicitly says “Forget WiFi networks on your iDevice or Mac” and “Forget Wifi Networks on AppleTV”. (Of course, elsewhere the instructions contradict themselves, so who knows?)
For other reasons, I travel with a GL travel router (I forget what model I have, but it was a cheap one) and it almost always works. (On two different trips, when it was in the same location for multiple days, it simply stopped working. In other locations for the same number of days, it worked continuously.)
Yes - I still have a brilliant Satechi travel router that has mutliple AC inputs, USB charging ports and ethernet input. its main purpose is to create a local wifi from the ethernet internet connection.
But I am finding that very few hotels now provide an ethernet outlet. They mostly want me to connect to their wifi, which I don’t regard as secure.
Regarding streaming, some services allow you to download shows to a Mac. So if you can get Airplay working directly between the ATV and Mac then consider temporarily downloading a few shows over hotel wifi and delete them after watching.
Of course, if I need extra cables, I can just as easily plug the laptop directly into the TV’s HDMI port - which is what I do today when traveling. The goal is to come up with something simpler than that, not more complicated.
AirPlay directly into the hotel TV would be ideal, but this is a very new thing and I have not yet seen it at any places I’ve stayed.
Here’s what I’ve got so far. I am currently out of town at a hotel.
My ATVv3 (A1469, TVOS 7.9) is connected to the hotel TV. It is not connected to the hotel Wi-Fi. I actually tried to connect it, but it fails because it doesn’t have a web browser needed to navigate the hotel’s captive portal.
I can connect to it from my iPhone and mirror the screen. That works. But if I try to play a YouTube video, it fails. I assume because the phone can only connect to one Wi-Fi network at a time and the ad-hoc network used for the screen sharing can’t access the Internet.
If I disconnect the phone from Wi-Fi, so it has a cellular connection to the Internet, that also fails. It seems to start to work, but once the ad-hoc Wi-Fi network is established, the cellular data connection drops and the video quickly throws an error.
I was not able to connect my laptop (an old MacBook Air running macOS 10.12, “Sierra”). It scans for but can’t detect the Apple TV. Which probably means that its macOS is too old to support connection via ad-hoc networks.
So, sadly, this is not going to be an option unless I do something like bring an Ethernet hub and get an interface for the Mac so the two devices can share a network together. But once I’m tethering the devices, there’s no advantage over just bringing a long HDMI cable.
Sure, wireless video transmission and using my phone for a hotspot are all viable options, but the goal isn’t “make my old Apple TV work on a hotel TV”. The goal is to answer the question “could I use the ATV to create a solution more convenient than connecting my laptop to the TV with an HDMI cable”.
And the answer is “not really - the number of additional things I would need to do would make the solution much less convenient”.
You might be able to do what you want using a USB Wi-Fi adapter.
I don’t have any Sierra machines available, but I just configured a MacBook Pro running Catalina for Internet Sharing using its built-in Wi-Fi and an Edimax EW-7822ULC USB 2.0 Wi-Fi adapter. The EW-7822ULC is low profile, so you generally don’t even need to remove it from the laptop while traveling.
I didn’t see a way to set up the Edimax as the internally-shared device, so I used it as the Internet connection, and I set up the Mac’s built-in Wi-Fi as the internally-shared interface. The only other quirk was that the Edimax device showed up in Internet Sharing as Ethernet device “en(4)”, not as a Wi-Fi device, but other than that, setup was straightforward.
I can’t directly confirm that this configuration will work in Sierra, but the Edimax has a Sierra driver, and it’s selling for $20 on Amazon. There’s a USB 3.0 version with an external antenna for $11 on Amazon that probably also would work, but the antenna is pretty bulky.
The goal is to answer the question “could I use the ATV to create a solution more convenient than connecting my laptop to the TV with an HDMI cable”.
I think you’re correct the answer is no and that all solutions are more involved than connecting HDMI directly.
To go back to an earlier problem mentioned, though, with the ATV not being able to connect because it doesn’t have a web browser, I suspect you can work around this by setting a MAC address on a device with a web browser that matches the MAC address of the ATV, connecting, then connecting the ATV. (And of course then resetting the MAC on the device you used to connect.)
This, also, is a bit of a hassle, but I have to do it regularly at a place my wife and I visit because of them limiting device connections to 3 (and not even 3 per person). I haven’t tried this with an ATV, but it works with my travel router–a Beryl AX (GL-MT3000, which has been an excellent travel router for us.
Wifi is ethernet, so in theory the laptop and ATV can constitute a “network” together (that’s what ad-hoc wifi is doing). But there may not be a way to force them to connect without using the normal discovery process. In any case, once the laptop’s wifi is used for the ATV, that’s all. Could you add a second wifi to the laptop with a USB adapter… maybe.
This whole thread is about not using an HDMI cable? That really would be the easiest, and most effective way to play video from your laptop on the TV. Or, as someone else suggested, get a wireless HDMI extender.
