Airplay functionality reduced in Monterey

In some vicious unhelpful semantic sense, I guess you can say that there was no loss of functionality. It would be more technically correct to say that Apple decided to make the functionality much harder to access and to further muddy their human interface guidelines.

As others have told you, streaming content from the Mac to AppleTV used to be as simple as clicking on the Airplay icon on the toolbar and selecting your AppleTV device. There were options like whether to mirror or extend the display. There was the option to stop streaming your desktop to the AppleTV.

(ALSO I used to have the Display icon on my toolbar to make it easy to get to controlling my displays, but Apple took that away a few years ago)

With Monterey you now have to open System Preferences, select Displays, and click Add Display and select your AppleTV there.

Unintuitively, when you select an AppleTV in the Add Display menu, the AUDIO will also be streamed to the AppleTV. THIS is where Apple hid the Airplay functionality that the OP was asking about. (and what if you only want the display output and not the audio output to the AppleTV? How do you control that now?)

If you want to switch between mirroring and extending, you have to click on the Display Preferences button to bring up yet another screen.

Once you have added the AppleTV, THEN an icon for displays appears on the Toolbar, but only until you stop using the AppleTV as a second display. To use the AppleTV again, you have to repeat the process in System Preferences.

And how do you stop sending video to the AppleTV? There is no Stop Mirroring option, and there are no checkboxes on the menu, so you just have to figure out that the trick is to click on the AppleTV in the pulldown menu from the temporary displays icon on the toolbar.

Meanwhile, the Apple fan press is crowing about how neat it is to easily make my Mac into a display for an iPhone. As if my $5K Mac's main purpose is to be a peripheral for my phone. I'm not against being able to display from an ios device to a Mac. I just don't see why Apple had to make controlling display output from my Mac so difficult.

I had to figure this out myself today. You can get to it from the Control Center in the menu bar. and you can go to the Dock and Menu Bar System preference and tell it to always be there as its own thing in the menu bar, like before. See Screen Shot. I prefer the old way but that's just me.

Whether it's called "mirroring" or "airplay" one thing is certain in my case, if I was watching a TV show from my ISP (Xfinity) on my MBP, in Catalina (my last Mac OS), I could select the "Airplay" icon (rectangle and triangle) in the topbar and the identical video would play on BOTH my MBP and Sony (via AppleTV HD). Now, that particular icon is not available and attempts to watch the same program on the Sony are futile, black screen and audio at best. Of interest, in the time line (progress bar) on the video, a micro image of the show can be seen but it does not expand to fill the entire screen. There is no Xfinity app for the AppleTV (nor Comcast app) so it appears that the ISP is limiting what can be streamed via AppleTV since the stream is seen on my iPhone Xs and the MBP. BTW, when trying to mirror the video from the iPhone to the AppleTV/Sony, again I get black screen with audio. This is not the way it used to be. Not an improvement in functionality but this may be due to my ISP not OS Monterey per se. Senior Apple tech support has been helpful but equally frustrated ultimately suggesting that the ISP might be the underlying issue. Thanks for your interest in this topic.

Maybe this changed, but in current iOS it is the same.

If I open the Control Center in my iPhone, all I see is Mirroring.

When playing in the TV application, I can choose Airplay - exactly as I do in the Mac - in Quicktime Player, TV, Safari (when playing back video files); but not in general. I am running iOS 15, iPadOS 15 and macOS Monterey 12.0.1.

They all behave the same way.

NOTE: if you choose Mirroring in Control Center, while running, for example the YouTube app on iPhone, it DOES use Airplay (meaning it shows the video controls on the iPhone, and plays the video on the Airplay device), so I think maybe it is just presented differently. Still, it is application based; if you switch to the TV application, you will have to tap the Airplay button again.

I don't have a Mojave mac anymore, but I will check in my wife's older iPhone (which runs iOS 12.*) to see how it was different.

CardsFaninExile wrote:

I’ve spent hours researching and speaking with Apple reps - “Airplay” and “Mirroring” are not the same. I can play the volume but not see the video as has been said by others. My Sony TV is as dumb as I am but the MBP should be able to stream to the AppleTV and be heard AND viewed on the Sony. Yes, I too can watch and hear QuickTime videos from my desktop but not TV shows.

What TV shows? The ones from Apple? I am pretty sure that those work with Airplay.

If this is a TV provider that has its own application, it is up to them to provide support in the application. If they don't, then all you can do is mirror, which the base OS supports.

And regarding audio: when you are mirroring the screen, you can still choose the device to which the audio is sent.

Here I am mirroring the screen to my Apple TV, and yet have my headphones selected. I can switch the audio output easily.

Hello all, Actually it is all there on the tool bar but you need to open the console which contains controls for wifi, Bluetooth, Airdrop screen mirroring etc. You can access everything by clicking the button on the top right corner close to Siri.

You will see this

Then you can access without going to system preference

Hope this works

All you need to do is drag and drop the "Screen Mirroring" widget from this thing:

into the Menu Bar and the AirPlay icon will stay up there!

I am not sure what you are saying.

AFAICT, Airplay from your mac to an Apple TV or other Airplay device works in Monterey much as it did before.

Some video applications support streaming the video, while keeping the controls on your mac.

That is dependent on the developer implementing such feature.

Airplay mirrorring or extending the desktop is available system-wide.

You can add an Airplay device in System Preferences->Display:

Any Airplay device will appear in the menu bar under Mirroring:

I don't understand what you mean by "re-introduce Airplay on settings level". Could elaborate on that?

Same issue here: I want to stream content from my Mac (2017) running Monterey to an AppleTV. The only option available on my Mac is screen mirroring (which is not streaming). When I choose to mirror however, only audio is shared, video not, screen remains black.

The airplay icoon is available on my iPhone, but same issue when air playing to AppleTV. I used npostart.nl to test, which is a very popular site in NL.

In previous MacOS versions you just hit the 'screen+triangle' Airplay button on your Mac, selected your AppleTV and content (both audio and video) was displayed through AppleTV on my TV-screen.

So agree we lost some functionality here. Or...?

Once you have added the AppleTV, THEN an icon for displays appears on the Toolbar, but only until you stop using the AppleTV as a second display. To use the AppleTV again, you have to repeat the process in System Preferences.

I am not using my Apple TV with my mac at all, and yet there it is permanently in my menu bar:

So maybe there is some setting that you are missing.

Yes, it says Screen Mirroring. You can't stream unless you have a video or audio file to stream. You start streaming from the video application, like Quicktime Player, and not from the menu bar. I have only had an Apple TV for about a year, so I admit that it probably worked differently in Catalina or earlier.

If you want to switch between mirroring and extending, you have to click on the Display Preferences button to bring up yet another screen.

Really? I can do that simply from the menu bar!

Before you say you have to do things some way, it is worth investigating a bit.

I activate AirPlay via System Preferences > Displays ... "Add Displays". That's simple enough for me.

For our five Macs, AirPlay has proven much better in Monterey than Big Sur. BS was balky and sometimes difficult to get to work. AP has never failed to connect on first try in Monterey.

I'm in the same boat. Before updating to Monterey, I was able to mirror my 2019 16-in Macbook Pro's screen to my Samsung TV (which is only a few months old) perfectly without issues. It still works, unless I want to watch something I'd typically stream on HBO Max, Xfinity, Netflix, etc. Video and audio on any site used to work using my TV as an extended display, but now they don't work anymore. I only have audio and a black screen for video. Mirroring YouTube and Twitch seem to work with video and audio on my TV, but I'm too disappointed to test any other streaming platforms at this point.

YES! Two days ago my Airplay worked on my iPhone12 and my MacBook Pro to stream SOUND via iTunes and Amazon Music Unlimited or Podcasts and suddenly yesterday it would only play using my iPhone 12. I noticed my MacBook Pro had not done it's automatic update to Monterey v.12.4 so I completed that, and rebooted. I have rebooted/reset my speakers, reinstalled the speakers, reboot the MacBook, checked my Firewall and VPN settings, reboot the modem, and then reset my modem and did everything again. I have spent probably 7 hours trying to get music to play with iTunes or Amazon Music, or Podcasts, and I have essentially come to the conclusion that my nearly new MacBook is essentially useless to stream sound on external speakers. Major fail on Apple.

In iOS Control Center you can choose Mirror Display-exactly as you can in Monterey. The only difference is that in Monterey you do it in System Preferences->Displays->Add Display, or using the mirror menu in the menu bar. Even the icon is the same.

This is from my iPhone. I have two options (one is my mac, tge other my Apple TV)