ARCHIVED FORUM -- March 2012 to February 2022READ ONLY FORUM
This is the second Archived Forum which was active between 1st March 2012 and 23rd February 2022
Without getting into the reasons, is there a way to turn off the Essence's Airplay functionality? That is, I don't want the Essence to broadcast itself as an available Airplay Device on my network, but I still want to operate it via the B&O App. Is there a setting / method to achieve this? (P.S. I want it totally gone from the list of my Airplay devices, not even available with a password).
Thanks in advance for any advice.
I don't think that you can. It wouldn't disappear from the Airplay list, but how about changing it's name to 'iPhone' or simply a row of spaces to confuse anyone trying to stream to it?
Because I don't know enough about the Essence, I would choose a more complicated networking method. Hopefully someone else will have a better, simple, Essence-specific answer for you. But just in case you're reduced to this, either:
(a) set up your wireless network so that the Essence is on your "guest" network (typical feature nowadays in WAPs), which ought to prevent connections to/from it while still allowing it to access the services you use on the Internet. Alas, this requires that the B&O app device driving it be on the guest network too. If you are the kind of person with "one iPhone to rule them all", you may not find this acceptable, but if you have a device dedicated to controlling the B&O, it's OK.
or (b) route your Essence through a gateway or programmable switch and turn off UDP port 5353 (MDNS) from passing thru one direction. I'm pretty sure that's how the AirPlay "advertisement" is transmitted. On the other hand MDNS may be how the B&O app finds its destinations too so this may be a bogus answer. But if B&O use some other secret port for finding their devices maybe it'll work?
Alternatively, if there's only you and one device (not a household of devices) you want the AirPlay not to appear on, *and* it's a Mac, you can disable the source from looking rather than disabling the destination from advertising: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/completely-disable-airplay.1434841/
The other resource is https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4849637, but Apple tells you *all* these ports they access so it's very confusing; only if blocking 5353 doesn't work...