Beamer 4.3.7 — Mac version

The crowd in a shared flat, someone who binned the telly remote, a MacBook owner tired of squinting at a small screen. Beamer is for anyone who wants a film from their hard drive on a big TV without fuss.

What does Beamer do?

It sends almost any video file sat on your Mac across the room to an Apple TV. No converting files, no USB sticks. You pick a video, press play, and it appears on the telly.

What sort of films will it play?

Most of the common ones. AVI, MKV, MOV and MP4 all work, as do older WMV and FLV files. It reads SRT and SUB subtitles too, so you won’t miss the plot in a foreign-language film.

Is it hard to set up?

Not really. Your Mac and Apple TV just need to be on the same network. Drag a file into the Beamer window and it starts playing. The app itself is plain English throughout.

Making subtitles appear automatically

Beamer works straight after you drag a file in, but a couple of tweaks make it feel more your own. Open the preferences — they’re small but useful.

• Subtitles. If you regularly watch films with SRT or SUB files, tick Auto-load external subtitles. Beamer then picks up any subtitle file that shares the film’s name, so you don’t have to load it by hand each time.
• Playback. Turn on Resume playback if you tend to stop a film partway through. Next time you open the same file it carries on from where you left it, handy for series or long documentaries.
• Audio. The app sends surround sound by default when the source file has it. If your telly or soundbar gets confused, you can switch to stereo in the audio output menu.

Playing old AVIs and MKVs without converting

People who keep a local film collection get the biggest lift from Beamer. Not streamers — this isn’t for Netflix. It’s for the person with a folder of old home videos in AVI, a stack of MKV films on an external drive, or lectures saved as MP4 files. Those formats often choke a smart TV’s built-in player, but Beamer for mac handles them without a murmur.

MacBook Air owners benefit too. The machine itself has no fan, so it stays quiet while the Apple TV does the heavy visual lifting. And if you’ve got an older Intel Mac that struggles with 1080p playback on its own screen, beamer macos offloads the display work neatly — the laptop just pushes data across the network while the telly does the rest.

Using only 150 MB of RAM during 1080p playback

In daily use, Beamer is light. It sits idle at around 80 MB of RAM when a film isn’t playing. During 1080p playback — an MKV file, say — memory climbs to roughly 150 MB, and CPU hovers near 5 % on a 2017 MacBook Pro. That leaves plenty of headroom for a browser and notes app on the side.

Startup is near-instant. There’s no library scanning, no background indexing. You open the app, you drop a file, it plays. Network hiccups do happen — a microwave between router and telly can stutter the stream — but the app itself hasn’t crashed once during a week of evening film sessions. Some users of a Beamer crack mention the same steadiness, and if you go that route just make sure your firewall rules are tidy so the app runs clean. It simply gets on with the job and stays out of the way.

• macOS 10.15 or newer
• Intel Mac
• Apple TV on the same network