iOS 7.1 and AirPlay

[dpenny]

Looks like a GREAT new feature in iOS 7.1 is the ability to initiate an AirPlay connection via bluetooth. I tested this process this morning and it works very easily. You will need:

1. an iOS device running 7.1, with bluetooth turned on (released 3/10/2014)
2. an Apple TV updated to 6.1 (released 3/10/2014)
3. a network route between the wireless network of the iOS device and the network the Apple TV is connected to

Item 3 just means that any device on your wireless knows how to reach the subnet your Apple TV is connected to. In my case, I have an iPad on our wireless network (10.20.x.x) and I connected an Apple TV on our wired, management network (10.100.x.x). I can connect to the Apple TV via AirPlay from one subnet to the other; no bonjour gateway needed! A nice addition is that all 80+ Apple TVs on our campus won't show up in the AirPlay list, only the ones I am physically close enough to to receive a bluetooth signal.

Credit to Derick Okihara at AFP548 for finding this: <http://www.afp548.com/2014/03/10/hidden-airplay-feature-in-the-appletv-6-1-ios-7-1-update>.

[cbrewer]

Has anyone seen this feature work with an iPad2? I've gotten it to work from my iPhone, but have yet to see it show up on an iPad2.

[bentoms]

@cbrewer, is Bluetooth on on the iPad?

[cbrewer]

@bentoms Yes, bluetooth is on. It turns out this may be caused by a bug related to a brand new Cisco AC access point we have in our office right now. Regardless, I'd still like to know if others have seen it work successfully on an iPad2.

[dpenny]

We have tested the following devices in our environment.

Confirmed to work:- iPhone 5
- iPad Air
- iPad (4th gen)

Confirmed to NOT work:- iPad 2

I will update the list as we are able to test with more devices.

[bentoms]

@cbrewer, from MacE:

Date: 11 March 2014 21:19:17 GMT To: MACENTERPRISE@LISTS.PSU.EDU Subject: Re: AppleTV 6.1 AirPlay via Bluetooth discovery! Reply-To: Mac OS X enterprise deployment project MACENTERPRISE@lists.psu.edu I shared this with one of our Sys Admin sent me the following: "Unfortunately, the word on the street is that this feature does not work with the iPad2. My guess would be that it requires Bluetooth 4.0. The iPad 2 has Bluetooth 2.1." The sad thing is we deployed hundreds of iPad 2’s in our district (the Apple “Education” unit). Oh well. davydave the Goofy Tech Dude

[gburgess]

I tested this in house here as well with my test iPad and an iPad mini. It worked with the iPad Mini as well and not with a an iPad 2. I can concur that it looks like you need Bluetooth 4.0 for this to work.

[dgreening]

The lack of iPad2 support is a serious bummer for us, as we almost exclusively buy the iPad2 "education" model. We have had mixed ability to use Airplay or Bonjour in our environment due to multiple VLANs and subnets at each location. I was hoping that this would help resolve those issues, but it does not look like it!

[rosco]

Hey dpenny, just wondering what you have set for rules on the firewall to make this work. I have found some pages that list TCP and UDP ports required for airplay but something is missing. If we allow all traffic it work. I would like to restrict to only the required ports.

[dpenny]

@rosco][/url: We do not have any firewalls on our internal network other than separating our VLANs. All of the AirPlay devices are on our internal network, so do not need to pas through any firewalls.

[rosco]

We did some packet captures and here is what we have come up with on the firewall requirements:

Incoming to AppleTV network:
5000 TCP
7000 TCP
49000-65000 TCP
49000-65000 UDP

Incoming to wireless network:
7001 TCP
49000-65000 UDP

This assumes a stateful firewall. The ports listed above are specific to AirPlay. There are other ports that may be required for full AppleTV functionality. Those ports can be found online (eg http://support.apple.com/kb/HT6175?viewlocale=en_US). The ports above are what we found in capturing AirPlay traffic and that don't necessarily match up with the online sources. And yes, the AppleTV opens a connection to the wireless device (7001 TCP). That connection was only seen when enabling AirPlay and trying to stream music (no mirroring). If the AirPlay connection was made and then mirroring was enabled, music and video would stream without the 7001 TCP connection from the AppleTV. Since it is also possible to have a single device stream to multiple AppleTV's, there may be other TCP ports that would be required. I suspect an incremental port count from 7000 on the incoming AppleTV network (eg 7001,7002, 7003...) and possibly the same on the Incoming to the wireless network but we didn't test this.

[ItsMe_Sean]

I have tested this recently and can confirm it works with said devices on a network with Bonjour disabled and cross-subnet communication enabled.

Really looking forward to utilising this to reduce multicast traffic on our network soon. Any word if this is going to be supported in a future update for 10.9.x?

Sean