Best Airplay Mirroring Router Setting Guide

Airplay Mirroring is a fun and cool feature to use, especially when you are showing off your cool games or videos to crowds of people. It is even better when your network is running smoothly and the mirroring works fluidly. In this Airplay Mirroring optimization guide, we will go over all the most common ways for you to improve your Airplay Mirroring experience. Please note that not all of these tips are related directly to the router, but they will no doubt help your mirroring performance during Airplay sessions.

We will cover all the tips and tricks to improve your Airplay Mirroring in two parts. The first part we will go over the most common reasons why your Airplay Mirroring simply do not work, and in second part we will go over some tips to improve your streaming experience.

Common Reasons Why Airplay Mirroring Do Not Work

Below are the most common reasons why Airplay Mirroring not working for you with your Apple TV. When Airplay Mirroring is not working, the Airplay button does not show up from your device. Go through each of these items as a basic troubleshooting walkthrough to see if they are the cause of your issue.

1. Either Devices Not Powered On and Not on Standby Mode
When you are streaming to your Apple TV, the Apple TV needs to be active and out of the sleep or standby mode for you to see your Airplay Mirroring option. Wake up your Apple TV first.

2. Either Devices Not Connected to Router
Both of your devices need to be connected to the router for them to communicate with each other. Make sure both devices are connected to internet through your router is an easy way to test.

3. Same SSID Needed for Both Devices
Some routers offer dual band and allow you to have different SSID. Make sure you connect both devices to the same SSID if using Airplay Mirroring over wireless. In addition, your router may also offer guest network which can be a different SSID as well. Watch out for your devices auto-connections. Remove the unused automatic connections to ensure that you only connect with the specific SSID.

Check the wireless network information to verify that information.

4. AirPlay Mirroring Option Not Showing on an iPad
With iPad, the mirroring button from Airplay does not appear in first view, you will need to scroll down from the AirPlay screen to see the mirroring option. You will be able to enable it. When you only select Airplay, only sound and just audio is streamed and no video without actually turning on mirroring.

5. Same Connection Frequency for Both Devices
This issue is reported by some users with specific brand of routers. A characteristic is that you can use Airplay over 2.4 Ghz frequency but not 5 Ghz. In this case, turning on IGMP Snooping can solve the problem.

6. Need Re-connection to Wifi Router
Depending on your router’s broadcast settings, sometimes you do not see the AirPlay option right away. A simple way is to turn on Apple TV first, then reconnected the “streaming from” device by turning off and on Wifi network. For example switching on and off your iPad’s wifi connection.

7. Unsupported iOS software due to lack of update
In general, your iOs version will have to be pretty old for this to happen. In this case, you are out of luck and will have to update your software.

8. AP Isolation or WLAN Partition Enabled
This router setting AP Isolate separates all the devices in your network. This means that no devices can communicate or see one another, which effectively disables your ability to use Airplay mirroring function. Make sure you have disabled this option on your router settings.

9. Airplay is Disabled on Apple TV under Settings
If for some unknown reason you have disabled Airplay under Apple TV, you will not see that option on your streaming device. Enable the Airplay from your Apple TV.

10. AirPlay Mirroring has No Sound
You need to turn on sound for both your streaming device like iPad or iPhone and the actual TV for sound to work. If you do not turn on the volume, you will only see video and no audio.

Common Ways to Boost Your Airplay Mirroring Performance

Your Airplay Mirroring performance is foremost based on your wifi network’s performance. We will device this section into two subsections, the first part are generally basic router guidelines that improve your wifi performance. The second part will deal more with the advanced settings of your router.

By completing these optimization tips, you should obtain better streaming and avoid unstable laggy freezes or glitchy choppy experiences. It should be noted that signal strength is very important in AirPlay Mirroring, without good connection, you are more likely to experience dropping out and disconnections.

Basic Setups to Improve Airplay Mirroring

1. Turn Off Bluetooth on Both Devices
Unless you are streaming or AirPlay with Bluetooth, it is reported that enabling Bluetooth can hinder AirPlay mirroring performance and you will get a more choppy result.

2. Connect Apple TV to Router using Ethernet Cable
AirPlay Mirror Streaming is a data intensive task that require your device to send and the Apple TV to receive the data. They can compete with one another when both of the streams are transmitted over wireless space. You can potentially improve the performance greatly by taking off one of the main competing signal.

3. Improve Your Router Placement
In terms of better streaming with AirPlay mirroring, you basically want to place your router in the same room as your Apple TV and the streaming device. If it is not possible, consider following these best use strategies for better router placement.

4. Choose Better Frequency and Channel
Pick 5 Ghz if possible and the bandwidth channel with least amount of competing network in your area. For more details you can check out the guides linked.

5. Stop or Interrupt Data Intensive Tasks
The Airplay Mirroring is competing for the limited wireless airtime with your other devices in the home or work network. Stop those heavy data transfers such as torrents or downloads can improve AirPlay performance.

Advanced Router Settings to Improve Airplay Mirroring

Now we will go over some quick check list that can further improve your AirPlay Mirror Stream performance. Please note that the “Basic” strategies outlined in the previous section has more weight than these advanced router settings. These settings assume that you have achieved a good signal strength by applying the best practices earlier.

Preamble Type: Short
IP Flood Detection or Enable DoS protection: Off
Multicast Rate: Higher value for better streaming performance, but it may hurt performance of your other devices greatly while Airplay Mirroring is active.
Beacon Interval: Long
WMM: Enable, needs to be on for devices to be able to connect to N and AC network.
DTIM Interval (Period): Long
Airtime Fairness: Enable
Tx Burst: Disable
No Ack / Ack Suppression: Disable
Optimize AMPDU Aggregation: On if both devices connected with Wireless. Off if Apple TV is wired.
Enable IGMP Snooping: Enable
Explicit Beamforming: If AC enabled iphone or ipad, enable.
Implicit Beamforming: If wireless Apple TV, enable.
QoS Settings: If available, set all AirPlay devices to highest level.

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