Q: Is it normal that Audio Airplay doesn't sync with Video?

This is normal behavior.

There are third-party solutions that have workarounds for this: Airfoil, for example, has a built in video player that compensates for the two second delay.

Apple just released Airplay mirroring for a limited group of Mac models. Mirroring of audio and video is achieved through a connection between these Macs and an Apple TV, and there is no delay that I'm aware of.

When you stream audio from your computer through an Airport Express using Airplay (not Airplay mirroring), there is a two second delay built in to account for buffering. This is normal behavior. As mentioned above, there are third-party solutions available.

Totally understand. Airfoil is an excellent solution.

Good luck!

there's still a 2 sec delay with most applications, but now Quicktime X is sync !

You can adjust VLC audio sync using 'F' and 'G' keys, up to 2.5 seconds.

You can set up your machine to play just music via airplay in Mountain Lion. Just go to System Preferences>Sound>Output> .......then select your Airport Express from the list. There is definitely a delay but i have found thats always the case with airporting anything.

Recomended Airport Express to a friend, now I have to blush everytime we watch a flash-video online ang the sound is two seconds behind the picture.

Using the trick of holding down "alt" button and clicking on the speaker icon on the top bar to switch to the Airport Express sepakers.

Hey man ... i found a way to work around the delay in VLC player. All u got to do is tinker with the Audio delay.

The shortcut keys are "F" to reduce and "G" to increase. When i reduced it to "-2000 ms", there was perfect sync between audio and video.

thanx, a good tip

how about youtube thoguh ?

Well for youtube i found that if i let it play the first time, its in perfect sync. but when i pause and then play again there is a delay.

BTW if u play your videos on the Quick time player, there is no audio delay. Download PERIAN. Its codecs for quick time player. Lets you play most of the video formats on quick time.

I just setup my airport express today to run into this issue myself.  I've tried a bunch of things, and this is what I found out.  The sound lag doesn't happen with anything that's in an Apple codec.  Meaning mp4, mov, aac etc are fine and lag-free for audio.  iTunes & Quicktime videos are fine; Apple movie trailers in Safari are fine. Anything that's not an Apple codec is lagged by 2-3 secs.  Youtube, vimeo, mubi, all.  This is clearly the result of how airplay works.  Looks to me like it does some sort of audio conversion for anything non-Apple, which introduces the 2-3 sec lag. AirFoil works for most, but not all situations.  For instance, when I play games, the sound is always lagged.  This most definitely will require a software update from Apple, if they're willing and can fix it.

Oh, and one last thing about AirFoil.  If a 3rd party software can handle the 2-3 sec delay and get rid of it, Apple needs to step up and provide the same thing on a feature that's supposed to be native on 10.8.  I'm currently using AirFoil, but I feel like expensing the cost to Apple.

This is such a frustrating issue. Have you come up with any solutions yet? I tried the trial version of Airfoil, which solved the lag for video files, however, I found that when it played from a website the sound issue was solved, but the video was choppy. I do not want to pay $25 for something that should just work either. I think I will have a word with Apple this afternoon.