Beamer is a Mac application by Softorino that lets you wirelessly send video, audio, and photo content from your Mac directly to an Apple TV or Chromecast device — no iTunes, no syncing, no fuss.
What is Beamer?
Beamer is a dedicated wireless casting utility for macOS that turns your Apple TV or Chromecast into an extension of your Mac's screen — specifically for local media files. Drop a video onto its window and it begins playing on your living room TV within seconds. That's the whole pitch, and it delivers on it with a simplicity that most media-center apps aspire to but never quite achieve.
What separates Beamer from the standard AirPlay or Google Cast options baked into macOS is its ability to handle formats that those built-in routes stumble on. MKV containers with embedded subtitles, high-bitrate H.265 files, multi-track audio — Beamer transcodes and streams on the fly without you touching a single encoding setting.
What does Beamer do best?
Beamer excels at zero-friction playback of demanding local video files on your TV. Where QuickTime Player's AirPlay mirror stutters on an MKV with a DTS audio track, Beamer quietly handles the remux and starts playing within a breath. I've thrown 4K HEVC rips, fan-subtitled anime, and old DivX files at it over several weeks — it batted close to a thousand.
- Broad format support: MKV, AVI, MP4, MOV, WMV, FLV, and more without pre-conversion.
- Embedded subtitle rendering: SRT, ASS, and SSA subtitle tracks appear correctly on the TV — a detail that trips up nearly every alternative.
- Playlist queue: Drag a folder in; Beamer builds a queue and advances automatically.
- Remote control: Playback controls live in a compact heads-up window; your Apple TV remote still works alongside it.
- Dual target support: Switch between Apple TV and Chromecast from the same interface without reconfiguring anything.
How much does Beamer cost?
Beamer is a paid application available directly from the Softorino website as a one-time purchase — no subscription, no monthly fee. A free trial is available so you can test it against your own media library before committing. Pricing puts it comfortably below the cost of a single streaming service month, which makes the value proposition easy to justify if you have any meaningful collection of local files.
Who should use Beamer?
Beamer is the right tool if you maintain a local media library and want to watch it on a TV with Apple TV or Chromecast attached. It is particularly well-suited to power users who have ripped their own Blu-rays, archive film buffs sitting on large MKV collections, or anyone who has tried and failed to get a tricky video file onto the big screen through VLC's network stream, Plex's media server, or Infuse's AirPlay bridge.
If you only watch Netflix and YouTube, Beamer is not for you — it intentionally does nothing with streaming services or browser tabs. Infuse on Apple TV handles a similar use-case natively on the device itself and is worth comparing if you want library management alongside casting. IINA and VLC both offer AirPlay mirroring as a fallback, but neither transcodes for Chromecast or handles subtitle tracks with Beamer's reliability.
What are the best Beamer alternatives?
The closest macOS alternatives are Infuse (client-side, runs on the Apple TV itself rather than casting from Mac), Plex (full server stack, more overhead but accessible remotely), and AirFlow (Chromecast-focused, similar drag-and-drop simplicity). For pure AirPlay mirroring without transcoding, IINA and VLC are both free and capable but they don't touch Chromecast and their subtitle handling over AirPlay is inconsistent. Beamer's strength is the deliberate narrowness of its scope — it does one job and does it well, which is something Plex's feature sprawl cannot claim.
Does Beamer work on Apple Silicon Macs?
Yes — Beamer runs natively on Apple Silicon. On an M-series Mac the transcoding pipeline is noticeably snappier, and even 4K HEVC content casts with minimal warm-up delay. Softorino has kept the app actively maintained through the Apple Silicon transition, which puts it ahead of several competing tools that were quietly abandoned during that period.
