Q: Airplay issue with El Capitan

I signed up for the El captitan beta releases a few weeks ago. I was able to download 10.11.4 beta update last night. I don't know what issues this latest update is fixing but still no change or improvement to Apple TV Airplay at this stage.  

LOL, we all bought the beta version in the store...

LOL. 

They wouldn't have dared to release El Capitan in this state if everyone had paid for it. 

Imagine buying a car and having things not working. The stereo doesn't work, **** we will fix that in an update, We need money now. Oh ya, that's what recalls are for.

I have been suffering this same problem intermittently through various OSs for a number of years.

I am now convinced that he problem is not with the OS.

I have an iMac with a wired connection to my router, which in turn has a wired connection to my AV amp and my TV.  The AV amp and TV are both Sony devices, but this is of no relevance as I had exactly the same issue with a previous Denon AV amp and the same family of routers.

My desire is to play my iTunes through my very nice home entertainment system controlled via the Sony AV amp.

When I turn on the computer, the Airplay doesn't show up if the AV amp isn't on.  That's obvious really, why would it?

If I turn on the AV amp, then it still doesn't show up.  Now, this is a little strange.

If I turn on the AV amp first, and then the iMac, then Airplay appears and it works fine, until I (or usually one of the children!) turns the AV amp off again while I am using it.  Now, I can't get it to come back on again until I unplug the AV amp from the wall and reboot it completely.

All this is a bit long winded, agreed, but the point I am trying to get to is that this is almost certainly an IP issue between the AV amp, the router and the iMac, and unfortunately my skills with IP addresses aren't good enough to resolve this, but my original point is that I don't think the problem is with the OS.

One thing worth noting though, is that when I launch my iMac into Windows 10 in Bootcamp, the connection is much better, more user-friendly and much less likely to time out or drop out after a period of time.  So, despite my love of Apple OS, it seems that Windows networking is a load better than Apple's.

Just to add, I have also tried setting the IP address on the AV amp to be fixed as well as dynamic on my network, and it still only works intermittently.

:-(

I'm going to try air parrot. It seems to be the same as airplay but it probably works. For all I know apple owns air parrot and this is just another way to get money out of us.

I'll post how well it works.

I hope you have better luck than I did. I installed Airparrot 2 on my system and the video did work. Sadly in my particular case, the video on my TV lags behind the video coming from the iMac. This wouldn't be a problem except that the audio coming from the iMac doesn't lag at all. The end result is that the video and the audio on the TV get way out of sync very quickly which is very distracting. In the end I had to uninstall Airparrot 2 because it wasn't working for me.

In the end I bought a mini DVI adaptor or whatever it's called and plugged it into the thunderbolt port on the back of my iMac. I then plugged a 5 metre HDMI cable into the end of that and the other end into the HDMI port on my TV. I then selected the specific HDMI port using my TV remote and I can now stream whatever is on my imac onto the TV and bypass Apple TV completely.

What I'm not happy about is the fact that I now have this thick HDMI cable stretching across the hallway. If you're distracted, it's quite easy to trip over or yank out of the socket with your foot. So, yes I do have a solution for now but it's far from ideal. The whole point of me getting Apple TV was so that I wouldn't have to deal with cables.

Incidentally, a friend of mine reinstalled Yosemite on his iMac and what do you know? The Airplay function on his mac started working again.

ugh this is pathetic. I also bought a stereo with airplay. My pc can stream to the stereo just fine using airplay on iTunes. My new macbook, nah.

I was hoping air parrot would be the solution. thanks for the heads up. Saved me money and more importantly much aggravation. I've already had enough.

Not the experience I was hoping for when I switched from pc to mac.

This solution worked for me. In my case, I had uninstalled Dropbox, but Dropbox was still in the login items list. I removed it and left the other login items in place. Airplay mirroring is working now.

Hi Darren,

Are you suggesting that uninstalling Dropbox and removing it from the login list fixed your problem?  Forgive my ignorance, but how do I remove it from the login list?

Uninstalling Dropbox caused the problem because it left and invalid entry in the login items list. See the post I was responding to for instructions to remove items from the list.

Thanks. You didn't link to any other post, thus the reason I asked

Thank you, Darren, for the hint.  I did not have to uninstall Dropbox.  I just quit Dropbox.

I found Dropbox on my wife's MacBook Air 13 with OS X El Capitan 10.11.3 and just had to quit Dropbox.  It fixed my wife's MacBook AirPlay connection issue to her Apple TV 3 (Model A1469; Software Version 7.2 (7512); OS Build Version 8.3 (12F69)) at her school.  She had this AirPlay issue only with her MacBook, but had no issue with her iPhone 6 (iOS 9.2.1) or iPad (iOS 9.2.1).  Not sure why Dropbox is interfering with AirPlay on MacBook.

I had the Duet too and now I deleted it, the mirroring is working fine now.  Thanks.

I don't have, nor have I ever had Dropbox, so this is not the problem on my machine.