Airplay peer-to-peer

I had a long chat with AppleCare today. They escalated the issue up to the engineering team. We went through an extensive list of procedures and there were still issues. I will likely hear something by Wednesday.

BI'll, did you disconnect the ATV and iPad/iPhone from any networks to see if it works? I found the exact same thing happened when my iPhone was connected to wifi and my ATV was connected to Ethernet. I turned off the wifi, and it worked perfectly. Not ideal, I know, but presumably this is an issue Apple will fix.

I have tried the peer to peer without any network connection, although, I had wifi on with my iphone and ipad. I do not believe you can turn off wifi on the ATV unit. I was told by AppleCare that you must have wifi enabled and bluetooth enabled in order to use peer to peer. I believe they messed up the software in some way.

Right, you must have wifi enabled on both devices. if I wasn't clear I meant don't connect to a network. So, wifi on, not connected to a network, or the Internet. Whatever you may be logged into on your iPhone, "forget" It. i'm not sure you can forget a network on the ATV, but that may not matter. My ATV was connected to a network, but as soon as I disconnected from the network on the iPhone, peer to peer began working flawlessly. At least this way you know if the basic operation works without interference from outside networks. Is there a password to connect to your ATV? If so, you might want to turn that off for this exercise as well.

Thanks for that. I am still getting inconsistent results even trying what you did. Disconnecting from the network does work if I have already had a connection, however, going from a cold boot into using the devices fails. I have a feeling we will see some sort of software update. I am not sure we are seeing this work as intended yet.

I discovered a few things this evening. When I first hooked up my ATV I had it on a WIFI network. Even with forgetting the network and trying the reset, I still had trouble getting peer-to-peer to work.

I found that after forgetting the network, I unplugged the unit. By doing so, it finally forgot the old WIFI network.

I have the ATV on, not hooked up to any network.

Bluetooth is turned on and searching.

WIFI is searching for a network (you cannot turn it off)

Airplay is turned on

On the iPad I had forgot the wifi network.

I turned wifi off

I brought up the control center

I turned on bluetooth first

I then turned on wifi

It takes a few seconds for the connection to form and then you will see the choice of Airplay and when you select it, it brings up the selection menu of where to play your media.

It seems to work ok now.

I also tested the iPad out with leaving the wifi network chosen, but the ATV was not connected. It still streamed video to the ATV

The only funny business is streaming a podcast to the ATV. I got the "your ATV is not hooked up to a network" message. I duplicated this on the iPhone

The iPhone worked the same way.

The key it seemed for me was to completely power off the ATV and then bring it up unattached to anything. I think they should have a menu choice that allows yo to choose a null router choice for wifi.

Anyway, progress. I am not sure what the deal is with the podcasts, but that is minor.

All .. I was beside myself with the whole Airplay peer to peer scenario. I went out and bought an ATV 3gen rev A as my old one was 3rd gen only. I downloaded iOS8 and just could not get it to work. Got the new OS for my ATV. It turned out when I swiped up on my iPad4, I did not see the mirror option under the ATV .. I had to SCROLL down to see it and there it was .. probably all along.

Unfortunately along the way, the journey was terrible. I could not believe the number of Apple employees on the other end of the phone who did not have a clue on peer to peer and tried to argue with me that there was no such thing. Then when I was distraught as I ASSUMED (bad me) that Yosemite would be out cuz .. well, of course I will have the upgrade to make my iCloud experience all it could be. So, "yes" to switch my iCloud docs to the new regime. Umm, not out for a couple of months. Oops! Then I "lost" my iCloud docs only to find out they are there but I just can't see then on my devices or in iCloud.com.

Enough ranting but ... wow, what a 5 day journey!

I tested with an brand new Apple TV (latest software) with iPhone 6 (8.0.2), iPad 3 (8.0.2) and iPad mini retina (7.1), none of the devices could find Apple TV peer-to-peer network. Even after I renamed the network, this function simply does not work!

I Use this technology everyday, and it works flawllessly. I have four Apple TVs at work and one at home, and they all work.

please provide the model number of your Apple TV. Also, confirm the software version your Apple TV is currently running and post here. Your iPad Mini will not work, as it too must be running 8.0.2 NOT iOS 7.

when you say you renamed the network, do you mean the Apple TV itself? Peer to Peer does not use a network.

step one. turn on Bluetooth for AppleTV

step two. Turn on Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on your iOS device

step three. restart your Apple TV.

step four. Pull up your control panel on your iOS device and select AppleTV mirroring

step five. Please let me know if this works for you. It took me about an hour of tinkering

to figure out I had to just restart the AppleTV.

What got me for the LONGEST time is that on my iPad, the ATV would appear (hence it recognises it over the WIFI-less connection) but I could not get it to mirror. I don't know what your issue is but with my iPad you had to scroll up to see the mirror option. Just in case that is part of the issue.

This doesn't make sense to me. Peer to peer should not need wi-fi on whatsoever. It totally contradicts what peer to peer would be. How do you know its just not using the wi-ifi to airplay like it used to? I'm lost here.

Hi George - I'm a college prof and would like to get to the point where I can go cable free in all my classrooms by using the ATV to mirror my laptop screen - I have a fantasy that one day I'll be able to just walk into class - flip open my laptop and my students will be able to see powerpoints slides, web sites or whatever I want to work with that day. I've been mucking around with yosemite and apple TV and still can't get to to work though. I'll keep my eyes on this site for a fix. Frank

It really doesn't solve anything... I have iOS 8.1 on all my devices and 7.0.1 on both of my ATV's but peer-to-peer doesn't work... Apple managed to screw every single thing on every single device they have...

George, I don't really understand your frustration. The main point of Peer to Peer is to accommodate guests, and free you from having a dedicated Network router you must log into to stream form your devices.

I can tell you right now that my company has 4 Apple TVs which we use to regularly stream from our Macs over our hardwired Ethernet network. Before iOS 8 and Yosemite, when clients came into the office, we had no way for them to use AirPlay from iPhones and iPads because they could not connect to the physical network, and our wireless guest network was on a separate subnet. Likewise for MacBooks. Only employees could access the Ethernet network behind the firewall, and the wireless network did not connect with the hardwired network.

Thanks to Peer To Peer, our guests can now come into the office and stream directly to the Apple TV from a recent iOS 8 device without having to log into anything. It has made presentations so unbelievably simple. They can also bring in their late model Yosemite Macs and do the same thing without having to have a dedicated employee ID. Even better, they do not compromise the office bandwidth with high volume media streams. Likewise for those of us who use our Apple TVs like external monitors. We no longer have to compromise office network bandwidth streaming large media files to ATVs, while simultaneously streaming or downloading large multimedia files from the internet.

Peer to Peer has a been a boon for my company for all of these reasons. It also makes sharing media contents with friends and family a breeze at home, without having to have them log onto my home network first. They just pull out their iPhone, select AirPlay and start showing me their pictures, videos and playing their music.

So if you can't figure out a way to use Peer to Peer yourself, please consider that you may not use every feature on every device you purchase. But for many it's an amazing feature that works flawlessly for me personally and professionally.