AirPlay Through pfsense Bridge

Thu, 23 Dec 2010 19:27:48 +0000

Howdy all, geek-mode enabled.

So I’ve been fighting somewhat to get my AirPlay enabled device (Apple TV) to function perfectly. I use pfsense to run my router and in so doing I’ve got a Wireless and Wired network that are bridged together. I found with the AppleTV that only devices on the same physical media could stream to it, though all devices could “see” it.

After submitting a feature request to Apple over this, I decided I wanted it solved for me anyway and I felt close to the solution. Since I had no logs to go by, I decided to bust out Wireshark to sniff all the involved network traffic. Suffice to say, I was rather entertained to find that when using AirPlay the payloads are flying around in IPv6, not IPv4. Just look at the caption in this post. All those teal packets is iTunes streaming audio to my AppleTV via AirPlay. It’s UDP over IPv6. Neato.

Broken on

AirPlay Through pfsense Bridge