I couldn't quickly find a detailed breakdown, but here's a basic one:

- Airplay doesn't offer multi-room audio; AirPlay 2 does

- AirPlay lets you stream from any Apple device to your speakers or TV

- AirPlay 2 lets you play from speakers over Wi-Fi, and it'll stay in sync

- AirPlay 2 lets play different songs in different rooms with multiple HomePods

If memory serves, the original AirPlay had much simpler goals. Stream music from a single computer to a speaker over a local network. So it has concessions like a constant 2 second lag, which happens if you press pause/play. I vaguely remember other weird restrictions when playing with it in the past (like one device at a time had to control a speaker).

AirPlay2 is a lot more complex adding the features mentioned above and better handling the use-cases original AirPlay grew into.

https://www.pocket-lint.com/speakers/news/apple/144646-apple...

The big difference for me, is that I can select any combination or all of my AirPlay2 devices from my phone, but I can only select a single airplay (1) device and nothing else at the same time. (For me, that means my old AppleTV can be selected, but nothing else at the same time, but any combination of my three Airport Expresses can be selected.)

In addition to the other features mentioned, I believe AirPlay 2 supports more media formats and more precise control over playback, and more metadata about the media playing.

Multi-room streaming and better lock-in to prevent projects like this one from being possible with open source.

I wonder if there was a way to answer that without editorializing. There's nothing stopping someone from coming up with an open source streaming platform, it just won't be embedded in iOS.

You mean it won't work with Apple owned device because Apple does not permit you to do so?

No I don't mean that, when there are things like Chromecast that let me pick content on my iOS device and see or hear it on my TV or stereo.

I feel like you editorialized kevin_b_er. Obviously they were talking about Apple preventing this software with working with the new airplay system. Where were they saying it's impossible to come up open source streaming protocol?

Airplay 2 haas reduced latency and improved quality. You can also stream to multiple Airplay 2 devices from iOS while iTunes on a Mac/PC can stream to multiple Airplay 1 devices.

In a nutshell, AirPlay 2 decouples the media and the control streams.

This makes play/pause etc instant (rather than waiting for the 3 second buffer to run out) and makes it much easier to do multi-speaker audio as they're all listening to the same media stream.