I got my iPad Air 4 a few months ago and have been wanting to test the AirPlay functionality on it. However, as I am on Manjaro Linux - a Linux distribution based on Arch Linux, I was unable to get the native support that MacOS has.

I stumbled upon UxPlay as a potential solution for this problem.

UxPlay is an AirPlay Unix mirroring server that acts like an AppleTV for screen-mirroring on the machine that is running the server. It only works on UNIX systems.

The README is quite verbose and only contains the package names for Debian, Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS, OpenSUSE, FreeBSD distros.

So, this guide aims to help install UxPlay on Arch/Manjaro.

Installation

Install the necessary dependencies.

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yay -S cmake pkgconf
yay -S openssl libplist
yay -S avahi gstreamer gst-plugins-base gst-libav gst-plugins-bad
yay -S gstreamer-vaapi
yay -S libx11
# If you are using Manjaro, you can should also install the manjaro-gstreamer
yay -S manjaro-gstreamer

Clone the UxPlay repository.

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git clone https://github.com/antimof/UxPlay.git
cd UxPlay

Build and install the server.

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cmake .
make
sudo make install

UxPlay will be installed to /usr/local/bin/uxplay.

Run the server.

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sudo /usr/local/bin/uxplay

That’s all there is to this!

Optimizing for GoodNotes 5

One of the main uses I have for AirPlay is to annotate and write notes in GoodNotes 5 without having the worry about the size constraint. Typically, I would use a 50:50 layout, where one side hosts my annotated notes (like a textbook) and the other is a notebook for my notes.

However, with AirPlay, we can configure GoodNotes 5 to mirror only the notes side (displaying it on screen). The other side will remain the same. This way, the layout can be 25:75 without sacrificing the readability of the notes as the notes are displayed on a bigger screen while still being controlled via the 25% on the iPad.