Airflow – Stream media files directly from macOS to AirPlay devices
69 comments
·January 29, 2025danpalmer
whazor
I concur, in particular, being able to quickly scrub a 54GB 4K HDR video and see it flash by on the television is insane. It also works fast on ChromeCasts.
tiagod
I use it with an LG TV (WebOS) and while it had some trouble in the past, it now works pretty well. Sometimes I need to disconnect&reconnect to the TV if I paused for too long and/or left my laptop sleep, but mostly just works.
The way it turns 5.1 audio into stereo (optionally boosting dialogue) is also quite good for some shows, I wish something as good was available in other players.
I don't think it's out of development. I thought of posting this specifically because I got an update banner when I opened it.
mrtesthah
>I'm a little worried that the app is out of development
Why? The last app release was Jan 3rd 2025, so about 3 weeks ago.
But even if it was older, once an app fulfills is purpose and is free of bugs and security holes, does it still need to be updated constantly?
unsupp0rted
I wouldn't have known that because their "check for updates" function doeesn't seem to work, even when triggered manually. I'm on 3.3.6, which is just a couple point versions behind latest.
I've been a happy paid AirFlow user for about a decade now, but I realize it's small indie sometimes buggy software.
danpalmer
That's good, I hadn't seen that update! I've been using the app for 5+ years and it doesn't appear to have changed its feature set or UI in that time.
My main concern is OS updates and AirPlay protocol changes breaking it, which would mean that it would no longer fulfil its purpose. AirPlay, being a proprietary protocol, is ripe for breaking third party integrations.
formerphotoj
Just a side note: I hoped AirPlay was stable after so many years, but everyone may already know that AirPlay 2 is a change that at least in my use case, made all my old Macs running older macOS and AirPlay 1 incompatible with newer third party hardware and hardware that updated firmware to AirPlay 2. Yes, I'm talking about iTunes! At least all my Airport Expresses still work fine! lol
latexr
> My main concern is OS updates and AirPlay protocol changes breaking it
Then you can safely ignore your other concern:
> doesn't appear to have changed its feature set or UI
Those things aren’t related, you don’t need to change the UI or features to maintain core functionality.
Y-bar
> But even if it was older, once an app fulfills is purpose and is free of bugs and security holes, does it still need to be updated constantly?
Subscription-based software: "Hold my beer!"
(This isn't one of those, which is great, I might buy a license just to support the ecosystem of regular paid apps).
la_fayette
More often I see two or maybe even more software products with the same name. In this case Apache Airflow. The two products serve a totally different purpose. I guess for marketing it would be better to have a unique name.
ianburrell
I think we should start putting the creator name in front of the app name. This seems to be by Bitcave company so it would be Bitcave Airflow vs Apache Airflow. It would be fine to shorten the name with context but use the full name to distinguish.
adammarples
It's really Astronomer Airflow now
cicloid
Isn’t that just a distro, similar to what AWS also distributes as Airflow, I think it’s called Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (MWAA)
jennyholzer
I think it's beneficial for the product's name to be similar to AirDrop. How popular is Apache Airflow? Looking at their website it seems to be a dead product.
NeutralCrane
Apache Airflow is extremely popular and one of the most commonly used frameworks in data engineering. I guarantee you it is more popular than this Airflow by an order of magnitude or more.
mastazi
I guess that Apache Airflow is more popular than the one linked by OP. Making a Google search for "airflow" in an incognito tab, looking at page 1, I see 5 results related to Apache Airflow, one result related to the OP, and a couple related to air conditioning (this was on Google Australia).
VTimofeenko
It's in use in _a lot_ of data pipelines.
nonameiguess
It's not even remotely close to a dead product. I work in platform-layer consulting where the services are quite often for customers who run ML and other data pipelines and Airflow is overwhelmingly the most popular DAG orchestration tool they're using.
I'm very curious what even gives you that impression. If you follow the link to their Github, it's got 38.5k stars, 14.6k forks, 3190 contributors, 92 releases, the most recent commit is from an hour ago. The most recent release is from last month.
staticautomatic
Plus everybody on Cloud Composer.
null
ajoseps
it’s extremely popular
lubosm
Still, it was only one Google search away.
zxvkhkxvdvbdxz
Back in the stone age when I used macOS there was an app called Beamer for this [1]. Then it got competition from AirParrot [2].
And now this, apparantly.
Maybe it should be a feature included in macOS itself?
TheJoeMan
I wish the feature could be rolled into VLC.
mft_
There's something similar-ish... if you have an Apple TV and install VLC, there's a feature that allows you to upload whole video files across your local network, and then play them directly from the Apple TV. It's a bit less conveient than Beamer used to be, but still good enough.
bdhcuidbebe
Seems highly out of place to me. In macOS and linux it’s in the a/v stack.
mft_
Another past paying Beamer user here. I used it until it stopped working, didn’t update, then was bought by another company for redevelopment and incorporated into a horrendous subscription scheme, compete with hard sell sales.
I’ve used VLC on the AppleTV since then.
Brajeshwar
Beamer user for a very long time. Now, I just Airplay.
nopakos
The title should say from macOS to Airplay and Chromecast devices. A very good app. Happy paid user here.
dmd
Is there ANY way to send audio from linux to AirPlay speakers? (I am NOT asking about making Linux an airplay TARGET, which is what Shairport-sync does.) Pulseaudio reportedly used to claim to support it, but there are many reports of people trying and none of anyone succeeding.
zxvkhkxvdvbdxz
Sure, same setup for PulseAudio or for PipeWire, iirc.
Btw, consider moving to PipeWire instead as it's the preferred a/v daemon these days.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#Streaming_audio_to...
1337_420_blaze
I've been using this project for a few years https://owntone.github.io/owntone-server/
dmd
That looks like exactly what I'm looking for. Thanks, I'll give it a try!
lxgr
If you can stream your audio via Google Cast, there are a few Cast -> Airplay bridges. I have one of these running on an RPi (I believe [1]), and it's been pretty much fire and forget.
dmd
That is something lets you become an Airplay device. I want to send audio to an Airplay device.
throwaway74354
https://docs.pipewire.org/page_module_raop_discover.html
RAOP Discover is currently at the point «It just works until it doesn't» (like most things zeroconf). Behaves fairly reliably in my experience if you don't mind some latency.
lowbloodsugar
Roon runs on linux and supports AirPlay and AirPlay2. Not free, but is excellent.
plurby
Airflow is amazing, been using it since 2019 when i bought the licence. Mostly using it to send media to Chromecast.
WillPostForFood
It is great, rock solid streaming. Money well spent.
daniel_iversen
Is this kind of app really needed when you can cast the screen from MacOS to the AppleTV? (or does it not work for other airplay devices or is too slow or something).
crazygringo
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure that casting your screen re-encodes the screen image in much lower quality.
Whereas Airflow is sending the original video steam over untouched, for supported codecs like h.264/265. So it maintains the original quality. Including resolutions that may be higher than your screen, like 4K.
al_borland
Using the screen over AirPlay is the wrong way to go for watching video, for several reasons.
That said, QuickTime Player also supports AirPlay to cast the video to an AirPlay device. I’m struggling to understand why I’d use AirFlow when I can use QuickTime? In my case I use Plex, which even makes QuickTime a moot point. I’ve also used VLC with the VLC AppleTV app; I could see where AirFlow could be an improvement over the rather clunky VLC experience (from what I remember).
spondylosaurus
Longtime (and satisfied) Airflow user, albeit casting from Windows to an Android TV: it's the only casting tool I've used that plays nice with subtitles. VLC lets you cast to a TV quite easily, but any subtitle data won't survive the jump.
yungporko
screencasting over airplay sucks for watching stuff, the framerate is just slightly too choppy that its noticeable and annoying, you cant close the lid on your laptop, and you can't easily use it while casting because either you're screen mirroring anyway or your screen has been stretched weirdly because macbooks have their own weird aspect ratio which don't match any TVs.
c-hendricks
> your screen has been stretched weirdly because macbooks have their own weird aspect ratio which don't match any TVs.
When you cast your screen to an Apple TV, the TV shows as an extra display on the computer, and allows you to set the aspect ratio however you'd like. Either when extending or mirroring.
Am I missing something?
alex7o
You cast the screen only in 1080p, but media can be cast up to 4k hdr+
Mindwipe
MacOS does have the functionality built in, it just barely works.
It also starts with no errors if it comes across a codec it doesn't like (which is most of them) but then just... doesn't work.
Airplay is a big pile of technical debt and they keep rewiring it every few years and not testing if the implementations talk to each other, so it just gets worse and worse.
lugao
Really solid program. I bought a license years ago because it is the only software that correctly remuxes media for direct play in Chromecast, including surround sound and HDR.
I wish Jellyfin could catch-up with the compatibility level AirFlow has to offer.
nijave
Jellyfin has slowly been getting better. Client also makes a big difference. I fought issues with Roku advertising capabilities properly before eventually hitting limits (100Mbps Ethernet) and moving to Nvidia Shield which has been working better (but still had an issue with HDR)
thom
Used this for years and years and it’s always worked perfectly. Hugely appreciate that my license is still honoured after all this time.
mmwelt
It looks like it also works on Windows (64-bit or 32-bit).
tiagod
Thought I'd share this great little app I've been using for a few years now.
seam_carver
I use this with my Chromecast for years on Windows/macOS. Great stuff for subtitle support srt and more.
Airflow is by far the fastest and most reliable AirPlay implementation I've seen. It's lightning fast. Truly excellent. The app is also super fast for things like video scrubbing.
I wish the app was a more native feeling UI, and I feel they could be doing deeper integration to enable more video playing. I'm a little worried that the app is out of development, but hoping they keep it going for new versions of macOS and AirPlay.