Troubleshooting

Last updated 9 September 2026

The most common complaint by far. The picture holds still for a second or more, then jumps to catch up. It happens in bursts, usually well into a session rather than at the start.

Almost always this is your iPhone getting hot, or being on a call. It is not your PC, your Wi-Fi, or AirMirror Pro, and there is no setting on the PC that changes it.

The picture freezes for a second, then catches up

How to tell that's what you're looking at

The status bar along the bottom of the AirMirror Pro window answers this directly. It shows the frame rate, Latency, and Skipped — and the one to watch is Skipped.

While the picture is frozen, is Skipped climbing? If it is not, nothing is arriving from your phone. The PC is discarding nothing because it has nothing to discard. That is the hot-phone case, and by far the most common one.
If Skipped is climbing quickly, frames are arriving and being thrown away, which points at the PC rather than the phone. That is rare, and worth telling us about.
If you see LOST in red, packets are being lost between your phone and your PC. That is a Wi-Fi problem rather than a heat problem — skip to the network section below.
Touch your phone. If it is warm or hot, that is almost certainly the whole answer.
Look at the phone's own screen while the PC picture is stuck. If the phone is perfectly smooth and the PC is frozen, your phone has stopped sending. Nothing is going wrong on the PC — there is nothing arriving for it to draw.
Are you on a call? Mirroring during a phone or FaceTime call is the worst case, and it can freeze even on a cool phone.
It recovers on its own. Let the phone cool and the picture returns to normal without touching anything.

What we measured

The same phone, the same PC, the same Wi-Fi, minutes apart — once healthy, once hot and on a call:

	Cool phone	Hot, on a call
Longest wait between frames	0.04 sec	3.5 sec
Frames the PC threw away	0	0
Frames lost on the network	0	0

The bottom two rows are the important ones, and they are the same two numbers the status bar shows you as Skipped and LOST. The PC discarded nothing and the network lost nothing. The frames simply never turned up — for three and a half seconds, the phone sent nothing at all.

Mirroring asks your phone to encode video continuously, which is one of the most heat-intensive things it can do, on top of running its screen at full brightness. When an iPhone runs hot it protects itself by slowing down, and video encoding is among the first things to be starved. A call takes priority over mirroring for the same reason.

What actually helps

Unplug the phone. Charging while mirroring is the single biggest source of heat. If you do nothing else, do this one.
Take the case off, especially a thick or insulating one.
Turn the screen brightness down. The display runs the entire time you are mirroring and it is a real contributor.
Put the phone on something hard and cool — a desk, not a bed, a couch, your lap, or anywhere in direct sunlight.
Close everything else, particularly the camera, games, and navigation.
Start cool. A phone that is already warm when you begin will start freezing sooner, and once it is throttling it stays that way for a while after it feels fine again.
Plan around calls. If you need a clean recording, take the call afterwards.

What won't help

These come up often and none of them are the problem, so they are worth ruling out before you spend money or time:

A faster PC. We measured the PC's share of drawing each frame at 0.11 milliseconds out of a 16.7 millisecond budget. There is nothing there to win.
Turning hardware acceleration on or off. It is already on, and decoding is not where the time goes.
Restarting AirMirror Pro, or your PC. It will look fixed for a moment and then come back, because the phone is still hot.
Changing your Wi-Fi, for this particular symptom. Nothing was lost in transit, so there was nothing for a better network to rescue. See below if your phone is cool and it still stutters.

Stutter on a phone that isn't hot

If the phone is cool to the touch, you are not on a call, and the picture is still uneven, that is a different problem and the advice above will not fix it. The things worth trying, in order:

Put your PC on wired Ethernet if you can. Your phone has to be on Wi-Fi, but the PC does not, and taking one hop out of the path helps.
Use the 5 GHz band rather than 2.4 GHz, and get closer to the router.
Check that nothing else on your network is saturating it — another device streaming video, a large upload, a game download.

If none of that changes anything, email support@airmirrorpro.com and say what you tried. It is genuinely useful to hear about a case that does not fit the pattern above.

Windows warns about the installer

The installer is not code signed yet, so Windows SmartScreen shows a warning on first run. Click More info, then Run anyway. Before you do, it is worth checking the download came from airmirrorpro.com or our GitHub releases page, and that the SHA256 on the download page matches the file you have.