Peer-to-peer Airplay suddenly a lot worse?

[pieter_schepens]

In our large school, we always use peer-to-peer Airplay to mirror the screen of iPads to an Apple TV. The iPads and Apple TV's are on the same SSID, but all in different VLAN's. The P2P discovery over bluetooth works perfect and the screen mirroring has always been good ... untill recently. Airplay mirroring to Apple TV's of the 3rd generation has become much worse (stuttering video and audio) since the last couple of weeks. In that periode, we did two changes: the clients were updated to iOS/iPadOS 13.2.x and the Zonedirector and AP's were updated from 10.0.2.x to 10.3.1.0. We don't know if those software updates caused peer-to-peer Airplay to be much worse. On the Apple TV's of the 4th generation, peer-to-peer Airplay is smooth like it was before.
If anyone has the same experience or knows if this has something to do with a bug in iOS 13 or a setting in the latest ZD firmware, any advice would be greatly appreciated.

[david_saez]

Hi Pieter,
I have seen a couple issues with iOS 13.2 devices recently, most of them related with Apple bugs in latest versions. 
- could you elaborate more on the issue, I mean, It is just stuttering video and audio or is the client connection being broken?
- could you narrow down issue depending device type, like iPhone X, iPAD, etc.?
- are you using dynamic VLAN on the WLAN?
- could you share a support info file of one of the APs just after this is happening?


Thanks.
David.

[pieter_schepens]

Some more information about the P2P Airplay issue (with Apple TV 3 and iOS 13):

• Connecting with Apple TV's (control panel > screen mirroring > the list appears > selecting > entering the four digit on screen code) is slower than it used to be.
• Even without playing video or audio, there is a slight and noticable lag between the iPad/iPhone and the Apple TV.
• When playing video or audio, sometimes you hear cracks and the video is not 100% smooth, sometimes you can't listen at all because of stuttering every second.
• Most of the time, the connection is not broken, that's not the problem.
• We tried it with iPhones (8 and 11) and iPads (Pro 10.5, Air 2, 2017): they all had the same problem.
• Older iPads with iOS 12 didn't have the problem at all.
• We used to use VLAN-pooling to distribute all the clients and Apple TV's accross 16 VLAN's, but because of the new Airplay problem, we stopped using VLAN-pooling and now use a VLAN override per AP group, in order to limit the chances that client and Apple TV are on different VLAN's. Both of those setups, VLAN-pooling and VLAN override, used to work perfect for Airplay mirroring until recently.
  

I can share a support file of one of those AP's, next Monday.

[david_saez]

Hi Pieter,
thanks for the good information shared. From what you tell me It looks like an issue with iOS 13.2 (we already have some cases opened internally), but this would require a further investigation inside a support case. I will wait for the support info from your side but I would suggest you to open a case and we will work on the issue.

Thanks.
David.

[michael_brado]

Hi Pieter,
    It may be a radical suggestion, but if you saved a backup before you upgraded the ZD, could you schedule
another maintenance period and revert back to the previous ZD version (at least temporarily, if you upgraded
to support new AP models)?Then, only the Apple TV and client OS would be different, to compare against the
observed list of issues?