iPad Mirroring - AppleTV or AirPlay app?

Hi, were looking into mirroring our ipads to the class PC's so that they can show them on the projector

What do you guys recommend for this? Lookijng at AppleTV and the many apps that do this eg Reflector

Anyone have experience of the apps and which is the best one?

I've tried AirServer and Reflector, AirServer was better by an order of magnitude. Faster, more stable, better featured. Cheaper if you buy in bulk too.

We did try an AppleTV as well but we couldn't get it to connect to our enterprise wireless network. In any case, a cheap PCI wireless card and a Airsever licence is considerably cheaper than an AppleTV anyway, not to mention that you won't have to plug another box into the projector and have to deal with teachers not understanding how to switch a source.

Using AirServer ourselves because it's considerably cheaper than AppleTV. Works pretty well.

Cheers guys, so I would need a PCI wireless card for airserver? Wouldnt it airplay from a PC on the wired network to the ipad on the wireless?

You don't need a wireless card per se, we've just put one into the PC for simplicity's sake.

We have a subnetted network here. Each block has its own subnet, the server rooms have one each, the wireless network has another. Airplay servers advertise themselves using Bonjour which can't traverse subnets without help. We had a choice of installing a Bonjour gateway of one kind or another or putting in a wireless card into each PC with AirServer installed so that the iWhatever and the AirServer PC were in the same subnet. We chose the latter to simplify matters, it works quite nicely :)

If your main network and the wireless network are in the same subnet, you don't need to do this.

Gotcha, got the same subnet for wireless and the wired pc's in the classes here

Will have a play with AirServer now, thanks guys

Can someone explain how to use / setup 'airserver'?

We were going to go down the route of apple tv but this sounds better!

Just looking for the icon on ipad / iphone i cant find the 'airtime' logo

There isn't very much to it. You install AirServer on a PC or Mac. It runs as a background process and advertises itself as an AirPlay server via Bonjour. Any iOS device on the same subnet as the PC (and possibly iTunes too, I haven't tested) will see it as an Airplay server and give you the option to output to it.

However, the iOS device and the AirServer do need to be on the same subnet as each other otherwise it won't work. This is because it uses Bonjour to advertise itself and Bonjour can not traverse subnets.

If you're running AirServer on Windows, you need the Bonjour Print Services installed as well

The issue for me at the moment is i cant find an airplay icon on ipad or iphone by double tapping the home button?

Are the iOS device and the AirServer on the same subnet? Do you have the Bonjour Print Services installed on the PC?

I do have bonjour print services installed. Will the icon only appear once it detects an airplay server?

Our pc's are on a different VLAN to our wireless, im guessing we need to therefore host the server on a wireless device or get a wireless card? Subnet masks are the same on iphone and pc with server running.

Yes, the AirPlay icon will only appear when an AirPlay server is detected, whether it's an AppleTV or a piece of software like AirServer.

If your iOS and AirServer devices are in seperate VLANs, they're not going to see each other as they're going to be in separate subnets too. The subnet mask is not relevant to this. You need to put both devices into the same VLAN. Re-read my posts and substitute 'subnet' for 'VLAN' :)

OK so i put the MAC Mini onto our wireless (same SSID as server) and now it works

This means every PC that needs to use it would need to go wireless dispite going on the same network? I don't think thats going to be an option :(

Any way round this or would we need to buy wireless cards for every machine? Could you fit the wireless card, connect it to the ssd (same VLAN) and still keep the ethernet cable to the network (2 ip addresses on one machine)?

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Originally Posted by Darylrese

This means every PC that needs to use it would need to go wireless dispite going on the same network?

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You see, that's the trouble. You've just told me that your wired and wireless infrastructure are on two separate VLANs. Despite being on the same physical infrastructure, you effectively have two distinct networks joined together with a router. The AppleTV and AirServer use Bonjour to broadcast their availability. Bonjour is a multicast protocol which can not traverse routers. The only way that you're going to get this to work is to use a product like this: Aerohive's Free Bonjour Gateway which acts as a Bonjour gateway between networks or to make sure that both devices are in the same VLAN.

You can put a wireless card into a PC and still have it connected to your wired LAN. This is what we have done because we have run into the same issue as you. Our wireless LAN and our wired infrastructure are on separate VLANs and that was the simplest way that we could think to get this working. Windows will generally use the fastest connection available to it for general traffic so you shouldn't see any performance issues this way.

ooooo i think the wireless card might be the way forward then! USB dongle or PCI Card? We have slim cases so would need a low profile wireless card, USB dongle would be better suited i expect if it does the trick