[Ghostdivision]

I dont know if this is what you guys want, as i agree having xbmc act as a airplay server would be much nicer.

But their is an ipnone/ipad app called 8 player, you access xbmc through the upnp in the program, then it plays on your phone but their is an airplay icon right below the album art.

To airplay it to a device hit the airplay button in the program, and its sent to your device.

So I am basically accessing the xbmc library through upnp with this program, then airplaying it to different devices.

Just did this right now actually, hit 8 player app, select xbmc library, play item, hit airplay icon to my device.

Would be pretty awesome if xbmc apps could implement this technology right into the xbmc app.

[Rantanplan-1]

@Ghostdivision: So you mean, you first stream the screan of your PC? (PC or MAC??) to your egg m sry iDevice, nd then use the Airplay function of your device to stream it to multiple airplay devices and controll all the volumes from there??

O.K. if this works nice.

Beside the Fact that this Solution sounds a bit unconftable, The Downside is you !need! an "partly shoten fruit" Device as your main Device, and in this case it is not as open as i wish.

i still dont get it why you mentioned upnp and what u do with it. Do you use upnp to stream your PC,MAC,Linux Desctop to your iDevice,? and if so, do you just see it there, or are you able to Operate it directly from there??

[barberio]

first of all we need a library we can use. As of my knowledge there is no library currently out there which takes an audio stream and shuffles/encrypts it in a way another airplay target would need it to be. XBMC makes use of libraries where it can. It wouldn't be doable with the size of the team if we would need to develop these libraries too...

AirPlay does not require encryption, only "AirTunes" did. You can use the AirPlay protocol to tell an AppleTV to play any http stream, so long as it can decode it. The AppleTV will happily start playing an mp3 podcast stream if you feed it the URL via a suitable AirPlay injector such as AirFlick.

If you can put up a lightweight HTTP server to do the delivery, AirPlay delivery is relatively simple because the protocol has been reverse engineered. For instance, here's a library implementing it in python - http://code.google.com/p/open-airplay/ - At it's basis AirPlay is just as simple as telling the AirPlay target to fetch media from a URL. There are some extras over remote controlling it for pause/play/skip, and it does bitrate selection if you give it the URL of a HLS formatted playlist.

The problem is that the container, audio and video format must be supported by that target player. So to play arbitrary stuff to an AirPlay target, you'd need to transcode to a supported format. I think that part is going to be outside of XBMC's scope.

[Ned Scott]

AirTunes and AirPlay mirroring use encryption. I guess it would be possible to just "emulate" a video to push audio out and bypass AirTunes encryption, but then you don't have support for audio only systems like the AirPort Express, or numerous 3rd party sound systems with built-in AirTunes support.

Believe me when I say that Memphis knows his way around AirPlay, much much more than I do. He even said he's played around with adding these features, but it's just not practical right now. It would be a lot of work and be very limited within XBMC, especially without a transcoding server.

[Ghostdivision]

That would probably a game changer for xbmc, which is probably why its so difficult to implement.

I wonder if you could do a plex sort of transcoding, plex seems to work well for that.

That would pretty much enable you to access your xbmc on a phone or ipad, and beam it to an airplay device.

That would be entire house integration for xbmc, xbmc would become an amazing front end/entire house server.

One can dream. Would that be outside of the scope of xbmc though, that would be more like a plex server thing?

[Ned Scott]

Oh, we're going to do that, but we're using UPnP AV/DLNA :D

XBMC will be able to "Play to" any other XBMC device or other UPnP/DLNA device, including various smart TVs and mobile devices. One of the devs might even do a transcoding server.

[barberio]

If you're doing "Push" style "Play To" UPnP/DLNA, and will implement a transcoding server for it, then there's really no reason not to include AirPlay support as well. For detected AppleTV targets, instead of sending a UPnP push command, you send an AirPlay one. Everything else you have to do will already have been implemented by the UPnP Transcoding server.

As mentioned, AirPlay "Push" to a http stream involves no encryption at all, the protocol has already been reverse engineered, and python libraries are available both to talk AirPlay and to use mdns to discover AirPlay rendering devices.

[Ned Scott]

No one on Team XBMC wants to do it. If someone else wants to and submit a patch, it will be considered. If Memphiz says it's a pain in the butt to implement, then I'm going to believe him on that.

[Memphiz]

It could be easier now that the upnp remote players are in though. Would have to look at it at some point but atm just too much is going on and this is very low prio for me - cause with airplay we will continue running after each apple change and that doesn't make any fun for me.

For anyone who is willing to do a patch - do it - but as clean as possible - i will be picky ...

[barberio]

So far, Apple haven't changed AirPlay to prevent the reverse engineered libraries working, and there are significant backwards compatibility issues that would strongly suggest they never will. So the probability of having to 'chase' library versions is currently lower than many other parts of XBMC.

[Memphiz]

ah yeah - if you say so...

[nikemen]

Well, instead of thinking about the goodness or evilness of Apple, we could indeed observe reality: Apple changes libraries A LOT, being DAAP the exhibit A. However, as far as Apple is concerned, DAAP involves just software. AirTunes, on the other hand, involves also AirPort Express hardware, thus, it hasn't been changed even once since the first AirPort Express was released back in june 2004. The last revision of AirPort Express has more than a year now, it has a different DAC, but not a single change has been added to the protocol.

[Memphiz]

we are talking about airplay not airtunes...

[nikemen]

Sorry I used the old name. Anyway I'm referring to the possibility of sending audio to an Airport Express, and the thread is mainly about that isn't it?

[Memphiz]

To me it was about movie streaming - but whatever - won't happen at least not from my side.