MythTV Airplay with iPad

I installed MythTV 0.25 without even realizing that it actually had support for airplay. It is a feature that is very easy to miss unless you read the change log, because there are no visible menus or settings for it. Anyway, this means I can now stream video and music from my iPad to my TV. This is really cool! I can start a clip on youtube and then just set MythTV as the output device. Or use Spotify on the iPad and output the music to my stereo. There still seems to be some issue supporting all types of content though, for example photos don’t seem to work. Also, outputting video from some apps doesn’t seem to work with MythTV.

When setting up, I followed the instructions on http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/AirTunes/AirPlay. I had some additional issues with the networking. I have two network interfaces in my MythTV machine, this caused some issues because MythTV isn’t on the same network as my iPad is. So I needed to change the mythtv backend address to be one that the iPad can reach. I also had some issues setting up the firewall. Strangely, I couldn’t find any instructions exactly what ports are required. Based on trial and error, I found that this iptables configuration seems to work:

-A INPUT -p udp -s <insert-ip-for-local-machine-that-is-reachable-by-ipad> –dport 5353 -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -p tcp -s <insert-ip-for-local-machine-that-is-reachable-by-ipad> –dport 5100 -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -p tcp -s <insert-ip-for-local-machine-that-is-reachable-by-ipad> –dport 5000 -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -p udp -s <insert-ip-for-local-machine-that-is-reachable-by-ipad> –dport 6000 -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -p udp -s <insert-ip-for-local-machine-that-is-reachable-by-ipad> –dport 40000:65535 -j ACCEPT