AirPlayer Streams Video to Macs

Published on 12-15-2010 04:28 PM

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQg046aoV9Y]YouTube - AirPlayer demo[/ame]

AirPlay is a significant extension of the capability of iOS devices to act as a real media player, rather than just a portable. This is a boon to people who already have an Apple TV, or don't mind dropping $99 on one. But what if you have neither an Apple TV, or a TV set to hook one up to... but you do have a nice big Mac screen.

Enter Erica Sadun's AirPlayer. The app runs a Bonjour server on a Mac which simply advertises itself as an AppleTV. Once it's up and running, all you need to do is select your Mac as a destination on your iOS 4.2 device and it's now a big Apple TV. You don't even have to jailbreak to stream video; that is, if you don't mind being stuck with YouTube. Anything with DRM on it will give you a big blank screen. Jailbroken devices running AirVideoEnabler, on the other hand, will be able to stream from any app that relies on Apple's MediaPlayer framework, including VLC, AirVideo, and HTML5 videos in Safari.

Erica's done a lot of work understanding AirPlay and Bonjour in general, and it paid off in this proof-of-concept app. It's still "extremely alpha" ware, but hopefully will inspire a lot more interesting projects with AirPlay. You can download the current version from Erica's website.

Source: TUAW

_{This article was originally published in forum thread:
AirPlayer Streams Video to Macs
started by
Paul Daniel Ash} _{View original post}

22 Comments

raduga - 10-16-2011, 04:47 PM

Originally Posted by virtualcappy

I can't believe this is not possible - It's got to be Apple's aggressive legal pursuit of anyone attempting it that's preventing its development.

or it could be simple lack of interest.

Most hardcore iOS developers use Mac, because its so much less hassle.
The devs that also create apps/tools for PC usually do that because they've written portable code and they don't have to redo everything from scratch. Or else they're masochists, or they just hate sn0w.

Porting Airplay to Windows would be a huge undertaking, for a deep-h4x0r with equal familiarity in Mac/Win/iOS and sufficient interest in making this happen. There might not be a whole lot of people who match all these attributes simultaneously.
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virtualcappy - 10-16-2011, 08:40 PM

Originally Posted by raduga

or it could be simple lack of interest.

Most hardcore iOS developers use Mac, because its so much less hassle.
The devs that also create apps/tools for PC usually do that because they've written portable code and they don't have to redo everything from scratch. Or else they're masochists, or they just hate sn0w.

Porting Airplay to Windows would be a huge undertaking, for a deep-h4x0r with equal familiarity in Mac/Win/iOS and sufficient interest in making this happen. There might not be a whole lot of people who match all these attributes simultaneously.

I see your point but I don't believe there are even any Mac options for current versions are there? Besides , there were a couple options to accomplish this is windows up until everybody abruptly dropped it about 6 months ago.

Either way, it's a shame...
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