rPlay turns a Linux machine into an AirPlay 2 receiver: an iPhone or iPad mirrors its screen to it over Wi-Fi, video flung from apps such as YouTube plays back natively, and you can drive the phone from the machine's mouse and keyboard. It also mirrors over a plain USB cable, with no network at all.
rplay_0.5.0_arm64.deb — Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm, 64-bit
sudo apt-get install -y ./rplay_0.5.0_arm64.deb
/opt/rplay/bin/rplayClick Start, then pick rPlay from Control Centre → Screen Mirroring.
📖 Complete Raspberry Pi guide — start here · Report a problem
This repository is for releases, documentation and issues. The source code is not public.
Built and running natively on Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm (64-bit), verified on a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B.
The whole Pi desktop: the rPlay window, the live iPhone mirror at 534×1080, and the tool rail for pin, home, screenshot, record and input.
The receiver window on its own.
Idle, advertising itself over Bonjour as an AirPlay receiver.
Measured on a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B with an iPhone 12, software decoding, stopwatch against a running timer on the phone:
| AirPlay (Wi-Fi) | USB cable | |
|---|---|---|
| Latency | 40–60 ms | ~480 ms |
| Frame rate | 30–49 fps | 19 fps |
| CPU | ~1 core of 4 | ~1.4 cores of 4 |
| Resolution | 534×1080 | 888×1920 |
40–60 ms over Wi-Fi is low enough that scrolling and typing feel attached to the mouse rather than lagging behind it.
On a Pi, use AirPlay rather than USB. USB delivers a near-native 888×1920 stream — 2.9× the pixels — and a Cortex-A72 cannot software-decode that in time; the shortfall shows up as latency. The same code does USB mirroring at 50 ms on an x86 PC.
- AirPlay 2 screen mirroring from iPhone and iPad
- Video streaming from apps (YouTube and similar), decoded on the Pi — including ad breaks, seeking and autoplay to the next video
- AirPlay audio, with or without video
- Control features — drive the phone from your mouse and keyboard. Pair the phone over Bluetooth and turn on Settings → Accessibility → Zoom on it. See the guide.
- USB-cable mirroring through a separate
rplay_wddaemon, so a crash there cannot take the receiver down - Bonjour advertising through Apple's own mDNSResponder
- Headless operation —
--autostart,--usb-mirror,--no-host-preparefor a boot script
| Component | Version |
|---|---|
| Raspberry Pi OS | Bookworm, 64-bit |
| FFmpeg | 5.1 (libavcodec 59.37.100), aarch64 with NEON |
| SDL2 | 2.0.22, X11 and KMSDRM |
| OpenSSL | 1.1.1w |
| fdk-aac | 2.0.2 |
| libimobiledevice / libusb | for USB mirroring |
| Bonjour | Apple mDNSResponder |
A full native build takes roughly 100 minutes on a Pi 4, most of it FFmpeg.
The result is packaged as an arm64 .deb.
- Do not enable hardware H.264 decode.
h264_v4l2m2mopens the device and negotiates correctly, then produces no frames — the mirror stays black — and closing that window has hard-locked a Pi outright. The driver is fine (the same stream decodes at 4.6× realtime from the command line), so this is ours to fix and it is not fixed yet. LeaveRPLAY_H264_DECODERunset; software decode is what the numbers above are. - USB mirroring is slow on a Pi (~480 ms), for the reason above.
- Occasional brief hiccup — a ~400 ms stall turns up roughly once every few minutes in some sessions and not at all in others. Cause not yet identified.
- Some app content served from the phone itself does not play. iQiyi serves certain items from the handset; those fail to open and are skipped, so playback advances to the next item rather than stalling.
- First USB pairing needs a replug, and reconnecting after an unplug can leave the mirror dead.
Pi 5 has no hardware H.264 decoder and is untested. Pi 3 is untested and is likely short of both CPU and memory.
Open an issue and include:
- Pi model and RAM, and the output of
cat /etc/os-release - iPhone or iPad model and iOS version
- What you did and what happened
- The receiver log:
/opt/rplay/bin/rplay 2>&1 | tee /tmp/rplay.log /opt/rplay/bin/usb-host-services.sh status
For personal use only — free to use on hardware you own, for your own non-commercial purposes. No redistribution, resale, bundling or commercial use without written permission. Provided as is, without warranty. See LICENSE.
Early, and published for a first round of testing. Mirroring, audio, control, video fling and USB all work on a Pi 4; the frame rate under software decode is the main thing being improved.