[steve1977]

I am playing with the thought to buy and install Airserver on my MacMini to have AirPlay mirroring and also an even more stable way to stream music and video to my MacMini. The airserver website says that it works fine in combination with Kodi.

A few questions to the community:

1) anyone is using this in combination and can share experiences?

2) does it allow to skip to next song when streaming music. This is one of the features I had been missing from current Kodi implementation

3) what screen will be displayed when streaming music? The standard XBMC or something else? I hope not iTunes or my OSX desktop?


Thanks in advance for any thoughts you can offer.

[nickr]

I don't think Kodi supports Airplay mirroring.

[steve1977]

No, it doesn't support airplay mirror. I am referring to an external software called "airserver", which is supposed to work in combination with xbmc and enables airplay mirroring (on osx and win). Was asking with experience using kodi in combination with airserver. Any thoughts?

[Memphiz]

Airserver is just another AirPlay Server which can receive AirPlay content incl. Mirroring. Kodi is also an AirPlay Receiver only so i really Wonder in which manner those 2 servers should interact. Maybe you Could elaborate a but what you are trying to achieve here?

[steve1977]

Airserver allows mirroring, so it is more feature-rich compared to the current kodi implementation. I love to use Kodi for my movie and tvshow library, but could use airserver to bring the full airplay feature set to it. It states on the airserver web-site that it plays well with Kodi (i.e., I can use airserver when kodi is active). If that's right, I never have to close Kodi and still have full airplay feature, which is what I am trying to achieve. My opening post includes the full list of specific questions I have. Thanks in advance!

[Memphiz]

Maybe those questions can be answered in airserver forum? (if they have one). I think if you are not use the kodi internal airplay at all then you could just disable it - at least this ensures that the airplay announcements between kodi and airserver don't interfer. For the rest i can't say anything because i don't have airserver.

[nickr]

Steve they have a free trial, you could be telling us by now. Not that it seems to be xbmc related anyway.

[steve1977]

Will definitely give it a try myself and post back on this forum.

I am not clear though why you are saying that this is not Kodi-related... There are dozens of threads asking for airplay-mirroring. Kodi is way more than a airplay-receiver and in absolutely no way would I compare Kodi with Airserver. Airserver can run in the background and advertises its compatibility with Kodi ("And now AirServer has even been optimized for dedicated Mac Mini’s connected to home theater systems running Plex or XBMC.").

Agree that my questions would be equally well placed on the Airserver forum, but I would think that the general interest and actually proven experience on this forum should be a lot higher.

Anyhow, let me give it a try how well it works and feedback to this forum.

[Ned Scott]

I'm interested in hearing how the window focus will be handled with both Kodi and Airserver running at the same time :)

[steve1977]

I will report back latest on the weekend.

[steve1977]

As promised, let me report back from my AirServer trial.

I have good and bad news. First of all, mirroring works flawless and also airplay audio and airplay video works well, too. It shows video in fullscreen and the album art is shown on-top of the Kodi window when playing music, which is fine. So, great news from this side!

However, Ned's suspicion was indeed right that the window focus is not working too well. I can start the video/music when on Kodi and I will see the Kodi screen once the stream is complete. However, the window focus after the stream is no longer Kodi. I once needs to press with the mouse on Kodi to have it react again (basically to have the focus back to Kodi). Unfortunately, I cannot get it to react again just by using the remote.

Besides this, Kodi and AirServer appear to be a great match for those of us looking for airplay mirroring. I will check in the AirServer forums whether there is anything that can be done with regards to the window focus. If anyone reading this have any idea how this could be solved, I would also appreciate any thoughts you may have.

Thanks in advance!!!

[huzz456]

Could I ask what operating system you're using and what exactly you installed to get it working flawlessly? I've tried a few times with it and I regularly get a message saying that Microsoft directshow doesn't support this format? (Or something like that can't quite remember exactly)

[steve1977]

Could I ask what operating system you're using and what exactly you installed to get it working flawlessly? I've tried a few times with it and I regularly get a message saying that Microsoft directshow doesn't support this format? (Or something like that can't quite remember exactly)

I am running Kodi and AirServer on OSX Mavericks. I have tried streaming directly from ITunes (audio and video) and mirrored from my iphone. Both work flawless. What does not work is to regain "mirror focus" after mirroring. I reached out to AirServer team and they got back that they will look into it.

I have not tried anything like netflix or hbo and also not AirServer for Windows.

[PantsOnFire]

This sounds quite encouraging. I'm going to give it a try on my Gotham, win7, iPad ios8.1 setup.

[PantsOnFire]

I tried AirServer over the weekend, here's my thoughts/experience:

Personally I think this is an okay place to discuss AirPlay+Kodi. The user support area over on AirServer's page has very little to offer ppl looking for help, a seach of their pages for KODI and XBMC returns little at the moment. The developer of AirServer tout Kodi integration as a typical usage scenario. AirServer runs as a separate program from Kodi entirely, so whereas I wouldn't call it 'integrated' as such, i agree its definitely a path worth persuing for those of us who want AirPlay from our idevices.

Some measurements:
-- I'm using AirSever 3.0.26 on Win7. The PC is low power-cosumption nettop PC by AsRock. Not powerful at all, Atom 330 processor.

AirPlay results:
1) Photos from Photos app airplay perfectly
2) Personal videos from Videos app play perfectly
3) YouTube AirPlay is broken in the same way it is in the usual way on iOS. -the developer suggests using YT in a web browser, it's a bit slower and clunky, but it works if you're patient enough. Personally I'm not. (YT seems to default 360p for quality in Safari, so you need to select 720 manually, then press play again before it beams. But once it does, flawless.
3) Vimeo. Playing the video straight off won't airplay successfully. Instead, you must use th iOS app to download the video first, then play it. AirPlay successful after that.
4) Twitch - did not try.
5) Music app/iTunes HomeSharing, works nicely, all functions loop like pause, skip, shuffle etc working. Personally for me, it does not display the artwork at all. Experience equals a systray notification stating which track is now playing, and the usual windows desktop is still visible.
6) Spotify, same as above.
7) Catch-up apps, iPlayer, 4oD. Disappointingly these did not work at all :-( :-( a black screen is shown with a message saying iTunes doesn't support these formats. Big shame IMO.

8) Mirroring. Worked okay for me, probably good enough in a pinch, but personally I found the compression and lag a bit of a letdown. At this point I don't know whether that's due to slow CPU speed of the PC, LAN/WIFI speed issue, or combination of both.

KODI INTEGRATION:
---------------------------------
Photos:
My XBMC runs fullscreen (ofc) with the
'Use fullscreen window rather than true fullscreen' option enabled (found in System settings -> Video Output in Kodi). Clicking hardwqre home button on iOS returns me to Kodi and I have control again (no manual refocusing required).

Music:
Using the stock iOS Music app, music plays in the background on the Kodi HTPC, no indication of the current song visible, control of Kodi still 100%.

Spotify. Works just the same.
Soundcloud. Works the same.

Video:
Home-shot videos from the Photos iOS app play fine (notwithstanding any WiFi bandwidth issues)

Videos found in the "Videos" iOS app play fine but when finishing (by pressing "Done" on iOS) I am returned to a black screen. (which if I alt-tab I realise it is the AirServer window on the HTPC with no content in it) -- a manual alt-tab is required to get back to Kodi).

BBC NEWS. there is sometimes video stored within news stories on the BBC NEWS iOS app. These fail to play with the error message 'cannot be played because its not a format iTunes supports'.

YouTube. Non-starter, has the well-known problem.

Haven't tried HBO (im not american) or Netflix.

IPlayer. As mentioned above, returns an iTunes error message within an AirServer window on the HTPC.

4oD. Sits at black screen on iOS, progress bar staying at 00:00. HTPC switches to iTunes program, sits there.

Infuse. Returns 'iTunes cannot play error).

Plex. Playing music: works! Music is played in background on HTPC, Kodi remains in focus.
Playing video: Playing divx funny enough works! MKV material does not. Although stopping playback returns you to black AirServer screen.
Though quite why you'd want to use Plex on an iDevice, to stream from a Plex server, over to an HTPC is beyond me. Quite impressed that it works though.

That's about all I tried.