I recently scored an awesome second-hand sofa for my office, which means that I can sit back behind my 27-inch iMac and watch TV and movies on the big screen. But I’m used to watching everything on my iPad, I’ve been using AirServer to turn my iMac into an AirPlay screen. It works flawlessly, and this alone would be worth the $15 price.

But now a new update adds screen recording, plus support for using your keyboard’s media keys to control playback from the iDevice

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgsCKeIXUXc

The video above is probably enough to make iPad 3 owners rush out and buy a copy of AirServer for your big-screen Mac. It shows the difference in the speed of video mirroring natively to the the Apple TV 3 and mirroring to the Mac using AirServer. The first is dreadfully laggy. The second is like playing with a wired controller. But that’s not all: The newest version of AirServer processes the video before displaying it, making for much better results on the big screen.

With an update to v4.0, the Mac AirPlay server AirServer has gotten the ability to mirror the display of your iPad on your big-screen Mac. This is pretty big, as you can now not only send video and music to your Mac as you could before, but you can make presentations and even play games, wirelessly.

One of the big new Mountain Lion features is AirPlay Mirroring. This will let you beam your Mac’s desktop, videos and Keynote presentations to any screen connected to the Apple TV. This feature alone will probably sell zillions of Apple TVs into conference rooms the world over. But who wants to wait until OS X 10.8’s summer launch? With a couple of apps, you can use AirPlay on your Mac right now.