This is a bit of a mini follow up to my recent post on AirPlay (I’ll be doing a longer one once I’ve got everything running the way I hope it will – Edit: never mind, scroll down to the bottom).
After discovering Reflector, and having a good play with it, I started to wonder if there were any Linux AirPlay clients out there.
It took some digging, but it turns out, there are! Well, there’s at least one. rPlay.
This was the page I originally found, which explains how to acquire the software and install it.
You will also need to request a beta key from the creators via their forum in order to enable mirroring.
http://www.vmlite.com/index.php?option=com_kunena&Itemid=158
Fortunately, my request was successful and I had a beta key emailed to me within a few hours. As soon as another Pi gets here (all my current ones are committed to other uses), I’ll be setting up Raspbian and giving it a go.
Being able to mirror the iPad over WiFi through a Raspberry Pi will make life much easier. It means I won’t have to lug around a laptop when I’m running workshops or giving presentations.
I’ll post up more info when I get the chance to try it out.
My Pi actually arrived before I got around to posting this.
After setting up a brand new SD card with a fresh installation of the latest Raspbian, following the instructions provided to setup rplay and install all the other things that need installing, Airplay mirroring just simply doesn’t work – at least not for me.
I’m still using iOS6, which was the current version of iOS when this was initially released (and when this was demonstrated in the video), but nothing I do will make mirroring work (I even went back and got v1.0.0 – the original one which claimed to work with iOS6).
Youtube streaming over AirPlay worked (Chromecasting didn’t), but it was extremely slow and laggy. It actually stalled, and then started playing again about 2 minutes after I closed the Youtube app on my iPhone.
I also just found out that the software has to talk to the (extremely slow) VMLite server to verify the license key before allowing mirroring, which makes it useless for me during workshops or presentations where I’m on a private LAN with no Internet connectivity.
I’ll be sticking to a Windows laptop with Reflector for now I think.