[colinjones]

+1
Just had my friend use his iphone with airplay on my XBMC and I was a little jealous. Would love to have a comparable feature for android!

Old though this may be, I just wanted to address this point as nobody else seemed to pick it up.

1. You already do have an equivalent Android (and indeed any platform, as its an open standard rather than Apple proprietary) feature.
2. Miracast is *not* Airplay for non-Apple devices.
3. The open equivalent - that has been around for 10 years, and has been available for XBMC for 6 years, and Android pretty much within a year of it being launched, so I guess 3-4 years - ie long before Apple brought out AirPlay - is called UPNP AV/DNLA
4. NOTE: AirPlay MIrroring is a completely different technology!! It IS equivalent to Miracast.

In brief - UPNP AV media streaming/DLNA is a layer 3 streaming technology. So is AirPlay. Miracast and AirPlay Mirroring is a point-to-point layer 2 technology. That means it is very limited - all it is doing is taking mirroring the digital stream that the video subsystem is putting out to the local display, and spitting that out over the WiFi interface to a compatible receiver. Even without any HDCP or DRM, the only thing you can do is 'mirror' your device to another display.

Basic AirPlay isn't really a good example of the difference, because it doesn't really do a great deal more, but that is more about Apple's philosophy than the fundamental architecture. So compare: DLNA - this is not 'mirroring' anything at all. You can stream any media (photos, audio, video, and theoretically extend it to any other content you wish). It has nothing to do with what is on-screen on your local device. There are loads of DLNA/UPNP AV apps on both the Play store and iTunes store. For Android I would recommend Bubble UPNP. DLNA can be streaming in the background from your device, and you can carry on web browsing, reading emails, whatever, as it isn't dependant on mirroring your display like AirPlay Mirroring or Miracast. You can stream from anything to anything, and control that stream from anywhere else - Eg, I have often used my Android phone to tell my Android tablet to stream a song to my main XBMC media centre. The tablet and XBMC handle it from there, the handset merely controls it. But I can then, with the same handset, switch and tell my Synology NAS to stream a different song to my Squeezebox Boom in the back garden. And theoretically I can continue setting up, controlling, or terminating as many streams as I like, from anywhere to anywhere. A single device could easily be the source and/or destination of multiple streams. None of this is possible with Miracast or AirPlay Mirroring.

DLNA essentially uses UPNP as a discovery service to find DLNA devices (sources/sinks/control points), this is a discovery service similar to ZeroConf (which Apple rebranded Bonjour, but is in fact not Apple technology and it open). It then uses this information to set up connections to stream media over and send commands (stop, start, volume, etc) to remote devices.

Hope this helps.