2014-09-25, 11:47
Sorry for the false alarm! After posting I went ahead and installed your Windows test build and saw the same problem - iOS 7 only seeing an audio device.
So suspecting the wireless network configuration I disabled the Bonjour service control system on our wireless controller and re-enabled normal multicast support, and now it works fine on both iOS 7 and iOS 8.
The service control system monitors bonjour broadcasts to build a list of bonjour services and then re-advertises them to individual wireless clients on a different schedule (and also in response to multicast group join requests) and thus "regenerates" all the bonjour packets as it sees fit rather than just passing them through immediately. Not surprisingly this does not seem to play well with the re-advertisement hack that XBMC implements, although apparently iOS 8 is still happy so in this regard iOS 7 seems to be more fussy about the order and timing of announcements than iOS 8.
With normal multi-casting in place I've now tested iOS 6.1.6, (iPhone 3GS) iOS 7.1.2 (iPad Mini with Retina) and iOS 8.0 (iPad 3) with the following:
Video: Instacast, BBC iPlayer, iMDB (trailer playback) Youtube in Safari, video from the camera roll using the Photos app.
Audio: Built in Music app, Spotify.
Pictures: still photos from the photos app.
Everything works fine, I can only find one small issue - when playing camera roll video from the photos app, when you switch to a video (static full screen preview on the iPad screen with the play button in the middle) XBMC shows the static preview image for a moment but then immediately starts buffering the video and starts playing the video even though the iPad play button has not been pressed and is still sitting on the static preview. For some reason it "jumps the gun" and starts the video before instructed.
This is a minor problem that I reported some months ago though and is completely unrelated to the iOS8 bonjour announcement issue, perhaps a shortcoming of the Airplay library used ? It happens with both iOS 8 and iOS 7.
For still photos the photo asset cache seems to work fine so it now displays the correct image from the slideshow.
Both iOS 7 and 8 see an audio only device for a few seconds after XBMC is launched, or the device is woken as before, but once it switches to Video it seems to reliably stay there.
So as far as this specific PR request for iOS 8 compatibility goes it looks very promising, and looks like a backward compatibility switch may not even be needed by the time of release.
I'll give the Mac test build some testing at home over the next few days as I'll be off work until Tuesday.
So suspecting the wireless network configuration I disabled the Bonjour service control system on our wireless controller and re-enabled normal multicast support, and now it works fine on both iOS 7 and iOS 8.
The service control system monitors bonjour broadcasts to build a list of bonjour services and then re-advertises them to individual wireless clients on a different schedule (and also in response to multicast group join requests) and thus "regenerates" all the bonjour packets as it sees fit rather than just passing them through immediately. Not surprisingly this does not seem to play well with the re-advertisement hack that XBMC implements, although apparently iOS 8 is still happy so in this regard iOS 7 seems to be more fussy about the order and timing of announcements than iOS 8.
With normal multi-casting in place I've now tested iOS 6.1.6, (iPhone 3GS) iOS 7.1.2 (iPad Mini with Retina) and iOS 8.0 (iPad 3) with the following:
Video: Instacast, BBC iPlayer, iMDB (trailer playback) Youtube in Safari, video from the camera roll using the Photos app.
Audio: Built in Music app, Spotify.
Pictures: still photos from the photos app.
Everything works fine, I can only find one small issue - when playing camera roll video from the photos app, when you switch to a video (static full screen preview on the iPad screen with the play button in the middle) XBMC shows the static preview image for a moment but then immediately starts buffering the video and starts playing the video even though the iPad play button has not been pressed and is still sitting on the static preview. For some reason it "jumps the gun" and starts the video before instructed.
This is a minor problem that I reported some months ago though and is completely unrelated to the iOS8 bonjour announcement issue, perhaps a shortcoming of the Airplay library used ? It happens with both iOS 8 and iOS 7.
For still photos the photo asset cache seems to work fine so it now displays the correct image from the slideshow.
Both iOS 7 and 8 see an audio only device for a few seconds after XBMC is launched, or the device is woken as before, but once it switches to Video it seems to reliably stay there.
So as far as this specific PR request for iOS 8 compatibility goes it looks very promising, and looks like a backward compatibility switch may not even be needed by the time of release.
I'll give the Mac test build some testing at home over the next few days as I'll be off work until Tuesday.
