Airplay keeps dropping out

I'd just like to add my experience. When I use iTunes on my MacBook Pro connected to appletv and this goes back to iTunes 4 or5 I had an iBook G4 and the Apple express connected to a Linksys router at the time now a new router and hardware and the same exact issue occurs. Once or twice in a 3-5 min song and again in the next song then it may not happen for a few more songs. It's annoying. Yet if I use my ipad2 or iPhone and use iheart radio or another music streamer it does not happen at all. It's fustrating as it's been a nuisance for 10 years and all is new except me my wife and my home.

It was driving me mental when songs would drop out when i change tracks on airplay through Apple TV 3 - but no problems at all with any of my other wifi speakers.

This sorted it for me... Go to Settings > Airplay and turn off 'Play from itunes in the cloud'. Solved it for me instantly seems 'the cloud' struggles with my music. like my missus.

Hello there,

I have been suffering from the same issue for years. I own four airport express I use exclusively for Airplay on different setups. I tried everything before (fixed IPs, fixed wifi channels, different gear) and it kept dropping out sometimes.

Recently, I activated QOS on my router and it solved all my Airplay dropouts. I mean, absolutely no dropouts for a month now.

Hope it helps others.

Juan

First of all, congratulations to fratinize on being married for over ten years, much more important that your marriage is working than airplay. I've been having this problem with airplay for years. I don't remember it happening with my iPad 3 and apple TV 3. Then I got the ATV 4 and the drops started happening. I would just restart the video. Then I got the iPad Air 2 and the drops occurred more frequently. I recently got the iPad Pro 10.5, and it's just as bad as the iPad Air 2. The worst, however is my iPhone X. Sometimes it won't even last five minutes without dropping out of airplay. I've accepted this as Apple's quality degradation over the years. I've got many more problems with Apple products. I've been buying Apple products since my first computer the Apple II Plus. I recently purchased a surface book with the Microsoft display adapter, and the video connection to the TV hasn't dropped once in the two months that I've had it. If you want to buy something of quality from Apple, buy their stock.

Another device working over wifi still wouldn’t rule out the network. I have many devices working just fine over airplay just as it isn for the majority. For the select group that experience issues it has and can be rectified by proper investigation of the network

Airplay doesn't work over Bluetooth. Try connecting Apple TV via Ethernet. Have you taken to a different location to test?

It may be that your ATV is dropping wifi, not just AirPlay. When AirPlay fails, can you still access the internet from ATV using one of its apps? That would confirm if you still have wifi connectivity. If you don't, there's another current thread on wifi dropping constantly. As vazandrew suggests, try a wired connection to remove possible wifi issues.

Interesting. Could you clarify what you mean by "streaming?" Are you playing a video, playing music, or mirroring the iPad or iPhone screen? AirPlay handles video playing differently, handing the stream directly over to the ATV, which handles downloading and playback by itself, independent of the source device. That's why the device player shows only a grey screen with the AirPlay icon. In this mode, ATV will turn off AirPlay if it loses the stream connection for any reason (server timeout, dropped packets, etc.). It will also turn off if the stream becomes unplayable for any reason, i.e. the ATV codec rejects the data. I've seen certain videos that play fine on iPad, but simply will not play on AirPlay. (I'm not referring here to balky starting videos, but to ones which AirPlay simply rejects.) Seems to me these were "commercial" videos on CNET or similar. So, your older ATV may be hitting snags that your other devices are able to handle. If you are using the video playback mode, you might try mirroring. If it is trouble-free, that would rule out simple AirPlay failure, and suggest that it's a problem between ATV and the stream source.

Are your devices on the same wifi network, or are you using the newer peer-to-peer AirPlay (which does use bluetooth for discovery)?

Sorry I didn't ask this before, but is your ATV on wifi? The symptoms you describe are as if the multicast airplay discovery packets are being blocked. Some routers don't route these between wifi and ethernet, even on the same router. Other routers handle this and it's not an issue. You should never need bluetooth to make the AirPlay connection. This Use AirPlay to wirelessly stream content from your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch - Apple Support Apple help document doesn't even mention ethernet, only wifi. When the ATV is wired, AirPlay from iPad may work intermittently, as you describe. It appears to "work", which is surprising, but then it just fails totally. Using bluetooth as you describe may get you past initial discovery, but there are still internal packets that expect to go direct over the wifi. I hope you can resolve at least some of these problems by switching ATV to wifi.

Regarding troubles with the lock screen, I think the iPad player must remain in the foreground for AirPlay playback to continue. If you stop "watching" the video, it shuts down the airplay. I haven't used autulock, but I suspect that locking would be taken as lack of interest, and would stop the AirPlay.

So I was having this same issue described in this thread and I believe I resolved the issue by making a change to my wireless network.

My wireless access controller (enterprise cisco network however same applies even for home routers) was advertising one SSID for both 2.4 & 5.1 GHz wireless networks. There is a feature in most new wireless access points called band steering. If you only create one SSID for your wireless network and it rides both your 2.4GHz and 5GHz network than your device will switch bands based on many factors including interference / congestion / signal strength. This explains the randomness of the connectivity as a microwave, or passing car, cell phone, or neighbor can generate wireless interference very easily. The issue resides with the sending device however because the issue was still happening on Apple TV's that were not configured for wireless and actually plugged in via ethernet.

So my solution was to create a separate 2.4GHz and 5GHz wireless network SSID (wireless2.4 & wireless5.1 for example) and then configure my laptops on the network to only connect to the 5GHz network, and not allow them to switch based on the algorithm it uses to determine what the best connection is. I went ahead and joined my apple TV to the same wireless5.1 network so that it would not "flap" between the two networks and simply remain connected to the one band. This same solution works if you configure your users to connect only to the 2.4GHz network you just need to be sure that "N" is disabled for the 2.4GHz range because "N" will operate in both bands.... Tricky, I know.

I implemented this solution in a couple of conference rooms in a 150,000 square foot manufacturing facility where we are all Mac based, and so far everything is working well, after the changes mentioned above.

Hope the info helps.

You would need to properly troubleshoot the network, another device working doesn't rule that out.

How exactly can you do that? Not all of us are in IT. Thanks!