Can anyone comment if airplay is disabled on pre 2011 macs? I'm going to be royally pissed if airplay is disabled because I'm missing some BS drm chip. Hopefully the era of "Jailbreaking" macs has not started.
Modern Intel CPU's have a quicksync feature which is H.264 encode assist in the HD 3000 and 4000 GPU. These features may be required to make airplay mirroring work.
Similar hardware is in the A5 chip in the iPad 2 and up, and iPhone 4S and up.
I wonder if there's a new API coming down the pipe for this. The obvious way to implement AirPlay mirroring, in my mind, would have been to add Quick Sync Video support as an optimization to existing video APIs, and then simply have AirPlay mirroring use that. Then not only could people with lots of free GPU cycles but no Quick Sync Video CPU (alas, like me) use AirPlay mirroring, but other video apps would automatically take advantage of the new performance.
AirServer functions as a destination already: http://www.airserverapp.com/
For a source, Airfoil works for audio: http://rogueamoeba.com/airfoil/mac/
It looks like a hardware limitation if you don't have the ISQV, you're SOL.
You're just missing the hardware (it's a huge efficiency gain, 13% of the time using the special hardware).
It works fine on my 2008 Macbook but it gets a little hot and noisy. The lag is noticeable but tolerable, fine for browsing the web but not gaming. Audio/video sync is fine too for watching flash videos or whatever.