[Ned Scott]

also remember that AIRPLAY is not working on Verizon Iphones (if you use that). Has not been enabled for video yet, as they are only 4.2.8 and need to be 4.3 to work.

Unless you've jailbroken and installed one of the enable-airplay-in-3rd-party-app tweaks and/or just manually changed those config files yourself.

My Verison iPhone has been airplaying 3rd party app video to my ATV2 just fine.

[agjh]

I've only newly started with the ATV2. Used season pass and running one of the very recent nightly builds with ios4.3 (hoping I can get this to the point of replacing my xbox1 shortly).

A couple of days ago whilst I was doing some mucking around with the ATV2, my son was playing a video on his ipod touch (non JB) and he noticed a new option to output to ATV. He clicked on this and it basically crashed the ATV2 to a black screen and even powering off / powering on etc would not bring the screen back from black (cant recall if I was in xbmc at the time although I suspect I was).

End result was I had to totally reset the ATV2 to factory and then re JB etc.

So, I had 2 questions.

1. The functionality of Airplay should be working all ok except for closing you out of XBMC?

2. Would there have been a better way to recover the ATV2 (like some sort of ssh reset command etc) than going all the way back through factory reset etc?

Appreciate any advice for ATV2 noob.

[ProphetVX]

Audio's not working fine in my experience. When playing mp3's from iTunes on a Mac to the atv2 (iOS 4.3 build 8F305 /w May 15 semi-nightly) the audio works fine for just under 2 mins then XBMC exits.

iOS probably wants full access to both video and audio hardware.

So the audio is working fine then? XBMC runs in a contained environment underneath the OS, this issue comes down to as much as XBMC not being able to output 1080p, unless there is a way found to directly modify the underlying OS while it is in operation problems like these will always exist.

Under regular situations Airplay causes whatever the ATV is doing to stop and use airplay. It's doing the same thing here with XBMC except XBMC isn't part of it's usual operation so it won't exit as gracefully.

People can't expect to use an OS function whilst in XBMC and have it run smoothly. You have two components fighting each other for access to video and audio.

I'd be amazed if there was ever a fix for this without some OS hacking to remove the airplay functionality and have it implemented in XBMC.

I don't see what the issue is personally... Unless you have XBMC to auto-launch and get stuck in a crashing loop, there is no hassle whatsoever to re-launch xbmc again.

[jd2157]

So the audio is working fine then? XBMC runs in a contained environment underneath the OS, this issue comes down to as much as XBMC not being able to output 1080p, unless there is a way found to directly modify the underlying OS while it is in operation problems like these will always exist.

Under regular situations Airplay causes whatever the ATV is doing to stop and use airplay. It's doing the same thing here with XBMC except XBMC isn't part of it's usual operation so it won't exit as gracefully.

People can't expect to use an OS function whilst in XBMC and have it run smoothly. You have two components fighting each other for access to video and audio.

I'd be amazed if there was ever a fix for this without some OS hacking to remove the airplay functionality and have it implemented in XBMC.

I don't see what the issue is personally... Unless you have XBMC to auto-launch and get stuck in a crashing loop, there is no hassle whatsoever to re-launch xbmc again.

Maybe "fine" by your definition... but Airplay isn't behaving as most would expect. Once XBMC exits Airplay stops working, so you have to reconnect (e.g. switch iTunes to play locally then back to Airplay or killall AppleTV).

I understand your point, i.e. Airplay is just doing what it's supposed to, but that's not really true since in other cases Airplay doesn't lose it's connection. There'd be no issue if Airplay simply took over, caused XBMC to exit, and then kept playing... but it doesn't. Maybe there's a way to have XBMC trap whatever signal Airplay is sending and to handle it more gracefully.

[ProphetVX]

Maybe "fine" by your definition... but Airplay isn't behaving as most would expect. Once XBMC exits Airplay stops working, so you have to reconnect (e.g. switch iTunes to play locally then back to Airplay or killall AppleTV).

I understand your point, i.e. Airplay is just doing what it's supposed to, but that's not really true since in other cases Airplay doesn't lose it's connection. There'd be no issue if Airplay simply took over, caused XBMC to exit, and then kept playing... but it doesn't. Maybe there's a way to have XBMC trap whatever signal Airplay is sending and to handle it more gracefully.

It's causing front row to "crash" because it is competing with a foreign program for exclusive locks on the hardware. You're exposing OS level functionality which shouldn't be exposed while in XBMC.

Unless XBMC has direct control over that functionality in iOS working around it will be nigh impossible. There isn't anything wrong with it as it stands, people are just expecting to have their cake and eat it too. Exit XBMC before launching airplay and it functions exactly as it should. This functionality expectation is like watching Netflix via the frontrow apple functionality and expecting XBMC to run in the background while this goes on. The OS simply doesn't support it, multi-tasking is severely limited on iOS.

[patranus]

It's causing front row to "crash" because it is competing with a foreign program for exclusive locks on the hardware. You're exposing OS level functionality which shouldn't be exposed while in XBMC.

Unless XBMC has direct control over that functionality in iOS working around it will be nigh impossible. There isn't anything wrong with it as it stands, people are just expecting to have their cake and eat it too. Exit XBMC before launching airplay and it functions exactly as it should. This functionality expectation is like watching Netflix via the frontrow apple functionality and expecting XBMC to run in the background while this goes on. The OS simply doesn't support it, multi-tasking is severely limited on iOS.

The AirPlay protocol is known.
Why not just implement it within XBMC?
I would be very useful not only on AppleTV but all XBMC builds.

[Ned Scott]

The AirPlay protocol is known.
Why not just implement it within XBMC?
I would be very useful not only on AppleTV but all XBMC builds.

It's been done for XBMC on other platforms, but getting it to work in XBMC for iOS will take some more work.

[ProphetVX]

The AirPlay protocol is known.
Why not just implement it within XBMC?
I would be very useful not only on AppleTV but all XBMC builds.

Airplay has been implemented in XBMC previously, it doesn't change the fact that you need to disable Airplay in the OS, otherwise you're going to have XBMC fighting for the Airplay port and just reproduce similar errors to what is being experienced now.

There is much more complexity implementing Airplay on iOS than there is on a PC with better control over the underlying OS and it's services.

[iLLNESS]

the airplay client for ubuntu (shairport/shareport) or any linux distro at that is not that great. it is still buggy and has buffer issues for many people. all its good for currently is audio streaming and even that doesn't work all that well. i expect this will likely be the only way it can run within xbmc.

[chrisjunkie]

Also experienced this today.

I think it is due to the AppleTV wanting to display information about the music it is playing and that is incorporated into AppleTV.app.

What someone needs to do (I can't reverse engineer software to save myself) is figure out how this hook works and all the other various things and incorporate them into XBMC.

In fact, the thing that I think would work (please let me know otherwise) is if all the core AppleTV stuff was incorporated into an ATV only XBMC build and we just REPLACE the AppleTV.app with XBMC

Would that work?

[Ned Scott]

Also experienced this today.

I think it is due to the AppleTV wanting to display information about the music it is playing and that is incorporated into AppleTV.app.

What someone needs to do (I can't reverse engineer software to save myself) is figure out how this hook works and all the other various things and incorporate them into XBMC.

In fact, the thing that I think would work (please let me know otherwise) is if all the core AppleTV stuff was incorporated into an ATV only XBMC build and we just REPLACE the AppleTV.app with XBMC

Would that work?

Probably not

if I understand correctly:

Turning off airplay for the ATV2 is easy enough to do (so it wouldn't conflict with XBMC airplay). So is adding airplay support to XBMC. The problem is that the airplayer for XBMC depends on other software that would need to make its way over to iOS.

[chrisjunkie]

Ah ok right that makes perfect sense.

Times like these I wish I could just do the conversion myself for the community!

What's the software used on other OSes? And what sort of things would have to be ported?

[Starstream]

Ah ok right that makes perfect sense.

Times like these I wish I could just do the conversion myself for the community!

What's the software used on other OSes? And what sort of things would have to be ported?

Airplay is really two protocols, Airplay for video & photo, Airtunes for music. Apple just renamed the older Airtunes as Airplay but kept it in use.

There have been a few reverse engineering efforts of these like forked-daapd and shareport so those would have to be ported to iOS to run within XBMC or XBMC devs create their own implementation for Airplay to work.

My own idea which may not be possible at all is could an add-on be crafted that listens for Airplay commands then gracefully exits XBMC so the Airplay command can be executed without any conflicts between Apple's player and XBMC ?

[AlexBooHu]

This is why XBMC is crashing while playing songs over airplay:

If you start a song from iTunes there is at first only this little notification at the bottom left, which you can see on XBMC too. So when XBMC is not running and you do not push a key the "airplay music-player" goes to full-screen, means it shows just the cover and song-information, the normal atv menu is gone. So when XBMC is started the apple tv tries the same, but fails. Maybe because XBMC is already fullscreen. To proof my theory you can start XBMC, start a song over airplay from iTunes and push a button on the remote every 1 or 2 minutes. You will see XBMC will not crash. Hope somebody with the skills can write a fix for that.

EDIT: Of course this is only for songs. Haven't tried videos.