Kodi AirPlay working with iOS 9.x devices

Recently i had to rebuild my HTPC as it was getting rather cluttered and slow. At the time, we were still running an older version of XBMC "Gotham" before it was renamed to Kodi "Helix". We were also running our iPads a little behind on iOS 8.x because while updates are nice, sometimes it takes a little while for the bugs to be worked out with most updates. This is especially the case when dealing with open-source software as things tend to take a while to be compatible with whatever changes companies like Apple make.

After quite a lot of Google searching to try and find some answers (there was quite a lot of "iOS 9 AirPlay broken with Kodi" posts) without much in the way of fixes for the problem. There was a very visible post on the Kodi forums when researching the problem which you can read here which detailed quite a bit about the problems with having AirPlay working in Kodi.

I came accross the latest changelog for Kodi "Jarvis" with some iOS/AirPlay specific changes. These changes included:

• Added support for iOS 9.0 by adding support for compiling Kodi with Xcode 7 IDE and iOS SDK 9.0
• Added initial support for AirPlay from iOS 9 music streaming capability
• Improved AirPlay compatibility suppor for iOS 8 (via updated libshairplay)

These changes started to look promising as they were implementing changes specifically for iOS 9. However Kodi is currently stable on "Helix" and "Jarvis" is currently in beta 5.

Knowing this, i decided that upgrading Kodi to the latest beta would probably be the best idea.

There are 2 options you have when upgrading Kodi to a development build, xbmc-nightly (Alpha) and unstable (Beta).

I opted in for the xbmc-nightly which is currently Kodi "Krypton".

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc/xbmc-nightly
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install kodi

I also stumbled upon this Reddit post

You may have to switch to 'Expert' settings in Kodi and hit 'iOS8 compatibility mode' on/off. Worked for me. Experiment! -- maxxdreddit

After finding this comment i realized that there was actually an 'Expert' settings mode on top of the 'Advanced' settings.

Once the Expert settings were enabled in Kodi, there was no "iOS8 compatibility" settings. However after reading a lot of posts on the Kodi forums explaining that Kodi no longer supported Pictures and Videos from AirPlay because of the changes Apple made last year.

Knowing this, i tested what would happen if i actually went to change the 'Enable AirPlay "Videos" and "Pictures" support' and found that there was a description of this particular setting down the bottom.

disable when using iOS 9 or later clients to restore music streaming via AirPlay. "Videos" and "Pictures" are only supported for iOS clients using iOS 8.x and older.

Immediately after switching this setting off, our iOS 9.x devices were able to use AirPlay again.

Note: Using AirPlay from Mac OSX El Capitan did work before turning off the expert only setting for Kodi's AirPlay service. I'm unsure whether this is simply a bugged bug, or whether OSX deals with AirPlay slightly differently.