Beamer is a utility that aims to make sharing video from your Mac to an Apple TV easy. Of course, screen sharing from a Mac to an Apple TV is already an option in Mac OS X, but Beamer makes it easier and enables full HD quality, with support for 5.1 surround sound.
Fire up Beamer and it offers a small window onto which you drag video files. You can drop multiple files on the window to create a playlist, and if you have more than one Apple TV, you can choose which one to beam the video to.
Beamer supports all the major file formats you’re likely to come across. It won’t play copy-protected content, but can stream a VOB file that’s been ripped to a hard disk.
The best thing about Beamer is its speed and simplicity — drag and drop and video is playing through Apple TV within seconds. You can even use the Apple TV remote to control playback. We tested Beamer with small video files stored on our Mac and a 3GB video on a remote server, and it never flinched. If we were being picky, we’d say that it’d be nice if Beamer also handled images and perhaps PDFs and so on.
Beamer is one of those small utilities that replicates what is already technically feasible on your Mac and yet makes the process that little bit easier. If you have folders full of video files and want to easily and quickly watch them on your big screen, Beamer is just about perfect. It’s a top-notch tool and worth every penny.
The bottom line. A superb little utility that lets you quickly and easily stream video to your Apple TV.
