[popcornmix]

This sounds like what happens when the mirroring feature bit (7) is not enabled - the video device can be selected but attempting to play results in a black frozen screen on the iOS device and no response or a blank screen on XBMC.

When this happened did you see a mirroring switch on the iOS device and was it definitely switched off ? (It must be off)

Can you use something like dns-sd to verify the correct features bits are being advertised in the bonjour announcements - eg those I posted a few posts back ?

What distribution is your XBMC build installed on ? I seem to remember that Raspbmc had it's own avahi hack some time ago that sent additional bonjour announcements external to XBMC - anything like that may be causing issues, especially intermittent ones.

Are you testing on an "ordinary" home wireless network, or like me were you testing on an enterprise wireless network which has some kind of bonjour management service ? (It's called "Service Control" on Meru, not sure about others) These can interfere with the announcement refresh hack XBMC is using.

I'm on a home network. Using Pi running OpenELEC (milhouse's latest buid).
I've just tried to reproduce. I rebooted OE and airplay was still behaving fine.
I rebooted the iPhone and then airplay misbehaved. The airplay TV symbol appeared (without the audio symbol) and when selected it shows a (disabled) mirroring button.
I pressed Done and screen blanked then returned to menu on OE. From this point iPhone is unhappy. If I switch airplay back to iPhone I just get a black screen where the video should be.
The progress bar moves as if video were playing.
This was using safari. I then navigated to the same (youtube) video in iCab and this played on iPhone screen, and when OE was selected it played happily there.
Subsequent videos are happy too.

I did try to capture this in a log. As usual after enabling debug it didn't behave quite the same. In this log:
http://sprunge.us/GAWT

it did the usual start/stop on first play. I think this corresponds to this in log:

Code:

17:40:58 116.911842 T:2777674832    INFO: AIRPLAY Server: Disconnection detected

And a CDVDPlayer::CloseFile() just after.

But this time switching to iphone playback worked okay, and then switching back to OE worked correctly.