Posts tagged with "airplay"

AirServer Brings AirPlay For Everything to OS X

During the past months, I’ve stumbled upon several Mac apps that enable to turn your computer into an AirPlay receiver. None of them, however, provided the same amount of stability and functionality I’ve found today in AirServer, a $3 app that easily turns your Mac into an AirPlay device for audio, photos and videos. Since Apple introduced AirPlay with iOS 4.2 back in November, many have wondered whether it’d be possible to use the streaming features of the protocol (for music and other kinds of media) on a Mac, rather than on iPhones, iPads, and Apple TVs. The number of Mac apps that came out promising to bring AirPlay on the desktop was quite overwhelming: from simple utilities to stream music to more complex solutions like Banana TV, developers didn’t even refrain from creating similar alternatives for iOS devices, turning an iPad into a receiver for video. And if that’s not enough, remember a few weeks ago a hacker cracked the encryption keys used by Apple in the AirPort Express station – opening the door to even more apps with AirPlay / AirTunes integration.

AirServer brings some clarity and unification with a $3 purchase and a simple package that runs in the menubar. That’s it, no UI. Heck, the icon can be removed from the menubar, if you want. What AirServer does is simple: it turns a Mac into an AirPlay receiver for anything. Provided you have an iOS device (or another Mac) to start a streaming session, you’ll be able to listen to music (or any other audio) or watch videos and photos coming from AirPlay on your Mac’s big screen. I have an iMac at home, and AirServer is just perfect on it: I can fire up Instacast on my iPhone and listen to my favorite podcast on better speakers (pardon me if I don’t have external speakers); I can find a cool YouTube video and instantly beam it to my Mac without sharing any link; I can take my entire Camera Roll and show photos of my last vacation to my (poorly sighted) parents on the iMac. Now we’re talking.

As for quality, I have tested AirServer on two different local networks with pretty good results. Videos stored on device start playing almost instantly; music quality was great, with a couple of lags on my slower home network in a 2-hour playing time; photos stream just fine with responsive touch controls as you swipe. AirServer takes a minimal footprint on your Mac, and I’ve also noticed it reproduces the fading effect you get on the iPhone when you change your audio source. Overall, the app is stable and I was pleased to see an update was issued a few hours after I bought the app.

To sum up: at $3 you get an AirPlay receiver for Mac that supports audio, videos (even from Youtube and other apps) and photos. If you love AirPlay, get AirServer.

BananaTunes Streams Your Music From iOS To OS X Through AirPlay

Erica Sadun, author of the great AirPlay hack BananaTV has come out with a new beta application; BananaTunes. Taking advantage of the recent reverse engineering of AirPlay it will allow you to transmit full stereo music from an AirPlay enabled iOS device to any Mac running BananaTunes.

Previously AirPlay hacks such as BananaTV or AirFlick and AirTuner only expanded upon the video side of AirPlay but thanks to that reverse engineering magic we can now stream music too. TUAW reported mixed results with BananaTunes (it is beta after all) with it working fine with their iPad 2 but having some issues with an iPhone 4. I personally had no issues using both my iPhone 4 and iPad 2 in playing music to my Mac through BananaTV, except a few initial seconds of stuttering that soon disappeared.

Ultimately Erica plans to merge the BananaTuner functionality into the BananaTV software, but for now you can download these two zip files (or this all-in-one installer) to try it out, but be warned it requires OS X 10.6 and only runs as a 64-bit application.

[Via TUAW]

2 Million Apple TVs Sold So Far?

According to a “survey of Apple suppliers” by analyst Ming-Chi Kuo of Concord Securities relayed by AppleInsider, shipments of the second-generation Apple TV have reached 2 million estimated units, with 820,000 units sold last quarter. The device originally went on sale in October 2010, and whilst Apple has always been touting the Apple TV as a “hobby” for a very few percentage of Mac and iPhone users, the second-gen Apple TV is based on an entirely new streaming system from the iTunes cloud, and AirPlay. The Apple TV is priced at $99, and can be paired with an iPhone or iPad for remote controlling functionalities.

Shipments of the second-generation Apple TV continue to be strong, reaching more than 2 million estimated units since the device launched late last year, according to a new report. Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo of Concord Securities revealed the results of his survey of Apple suppliers on Tuesday. The numbers show that sales of the Apple TV have held relatively steady since the device first went on sale last October.

In December, Apple announced 1 million Apple TVs had been sold in three months. Although the report by Ming-Chi Kuo claims 820k units have been sold in Q2 with shipments topping 2 million, an Apple TV sales estimate from October of last year suggested that Apple could sell 1 million Apple TVs per quarter. Apple is set to announced its Q2 2011 financial results later today, but just like the iPod touch Apple TV sales numbers shouldn’t be disclosed by the company.

In the past months, Apple has focused on fixing compatibility issues with the Apple TV and various HDTVs, as well as adding new features to the box like NBA League Pass and MLB.tv integration. Apple is also rumored to be considering licensing the AirPlay streaming technology to third-party TV makers – a move that would allow the company to receive royalties, and expand the AirPlay userbase with millions of non-Apple TVs connected to iOS devices.

Sonos Brings AirPlay Support With Latest Software Update

Sonos, makers of beautiful and efficient wireless music system including the S5 I reviewed here, announced today the release of the official Android client, and a software update that brings official AirPlay support to the Sonos Desktop Controller, and better multitasking integration on the iOS apps. What’s curious is that I was already able to accomplish AirPlay streaming by connecting a Sonos S5 to an AirPort Express as you can read here. I guess Sonos, however, added some overall polish to the desktop app to indicate support for AirPlay – I can’t test the feature now, but I can say that it was already working very well when I first connected an S5 to my AirPort Express with the line-in cable. Last, an update to the iPhone and iPad app should bring support for iOS multitasking (finally), although said update still isn’t available in the App Store.

Press release is embedded below. I’m a huge fan of Sonos’ products, so I’ll make sure to check out the new iOS app and updated AirPlay integration as soon as I can. [via CrunchGear] Read more

Showyou: An Interactive Wall To Watch and Share Videos

Released yesterday for free in the App Store, Showyou is a new universal app aimed at letting you discover videos shared by your friends on Twitter and Facebook, and share these findings yourself in your social graph. Unlike Squrl – which we reviewed yesterday as well – Showyou isn’t a service meant for curating videos in collections and grab them from a web browser through a bookmarklet: rather, it’s a very simple app that wants to offer a better way to browse videos found on Twitter and Facebook with the “Showyou Grid” – a 2D video wall that you can pan horizontally and vertically, very similar to what we’ve already seen in the Aweditorium iPad app.

Once logged in with Twitter or Facebook, Showyou will find friends that are already using the app and it gives you the option to “follow them”. The more people you follow, the more videos you get and the more populated the Grid becomes. By default it shows nearly 1,000 videos – many of those collected from Showyou’s system, so it really depends on how many people you start following and how much content they decide to share publicly. But there’s no doubt Showyou works best the moment you start following people and engaging with the service itself, as it also showcases “featured users” the developers recommend you follow to get interesting videos. The video wall was quite responsive yesterday when I first installed the app, but I’m noticing some slow loading times today – presumably a lot of people gave Showyou a try (again, it’s free) and the servers are getting hammered under heavy traffic. When videos load, however, not only you get a beautiful presentation with big thumbnails and an elegant Futura font – you can tap on each video to view it in a bigger popup window overlaying the main grid, share it or leave a comment. You can also tell a user you liked a video he shared by “thanking” him. If you don’t like the Grid view, you can switch to a cleaner list that shows you videos one after the other.

Overall, Showyou it’s a really simple app that gets one thing done extremely well: collecting videos shared by your friends. It’s not as full-featured as Squrl when it comes to exploring the Internet hunting for cool videos to curate (I mean, they’re two deeply different products), but if you’re looking for an easy way to see what your friends are watching you should take Showyou for a spin.

JBL’s On Air Wireless AirPlay Speaker Dock Now Shipping

Unofficially revealed by the FCC in December 2010 and teased a few weeks ago by JBL itself with a signup product page, the On Air Wireless speaker dock with AirPlay functionalities is now shipping to Best Buy locations and Apple Stores. We’ve covered the On Air Wireless in the past, but here’s a quick recap: the device has built-in AirPlay support, meaning that it can receive audio from iOS devices, or Macs through iTunes; with the integration of an LCD display, it can also display artists’ information and album artwork for a richer wireless music experience; with the exclusive HALO radial design, it should guarantee an optimal audio quality to send music throughout your room. It is one of the first speakers (let alone speaker / dock) to display metadata coming from AirPlay, but there’s more: the thing has got playback control buttons, a clock with dual alarms to wake you at different times of the day, a digital FM radio and a USB port for firmware updates. It can be yours for $349 – it’s a premium product with lots of functionalities and deep AirPlay integration clearly meant for iOS and Mac users.

Press release below, order page available on the Apple online store. [via Engadget] Read more

Cracked AirPort Express Key Could Allow AirPlay Streaming To Any Device

When Apple introduced AirPlay with iOS 4.2, they brought wireless streaming for music and video to iOS devices, as well as iTunes on the desktop thanks to the old AirTunes technology that allowed music streaming to an AirPort Express station connected to speakers with a simple audio jack. After the unification of streaming under the AirPlay name, several hacks in the past months allowed iOS and Mac users to enable streaming on unsupported devices such as iPhones or Macs. Developer James Laird, however, has achieved a different goal than simply activating audio and video receiving functionalities: by reverse engineering the AirPort Express (and thus AirTunes) private key used by Apple to stream audio to external music speakers, he released ShairPort, an open source AirPort Express emulator.

My girlfriend moved house, and her Airport Express no longer made it with her wireless access point. I figured it’d be easy to find an ApEx emulator - there are several open source apps out there to play to them. However, I was disappointed to find that Apple used a public-key crypto scheme, and there’s a private key hiding inside the ApEx. So I took it apart (I still have scars from opening the glued case!), dumped the ROM, and reverse engineered the keys out of it.

The concept behind ShairPort is very simple: instead of enabling streaming from an app to an official AirPlay device from Apple or third-party vendor, Shareport can turn any software or hardware into a wireless music receiver thanks to the cracked private key used by Apple. Being the project open source, virtually anyone could build a hardware receiver or application that streams music just like the AirPort Express station does through the AirTunes protocol.

While it’s very unlikely that manufacturers will adopt this hack to turn their devices into AirPlay receivers (why using the hack when you can just become an official AirPlay partner?), I’m sure we’ll see interesting things on the software end this week. ShairPort can be installed anywhere, opening to the possibility of gaming consoles, computers, or mobile devices gaining AirPlay functionalities previously reserved to the AirPort Express.

Go download ShairPort here. [via MacRumors]

PhotoSync 1.1 Lets You Upload to Dropbox, AirPlay Videos

PhotoSync is a universal iOS application I reviewed a couple of months ago which allows you to share photos and videos shot on an iOS device in a completely new way: thanks to its powerful feature set, PhotoSync can send media from iOS to iOS, and from iOS to a Windows PC or Mac. Unlike several other iOS apps that usually launch a WebDAV server locally to share photos with a computer, or only enable you to send files over to another machine through a standalone utility running on the desktop, PhotoSync can do an actual iOS-to-iOS communication as well as standard desktop sharing. It requires a companion app if you want to send items to your computer, but configuration is painless if you just want to share photos and videos between iPhones and iPads using WiFi or Bluetooth.

The latest update to PhotoSync, released a few hours ago in the App Store, adds the possibility of uploading files to Dropbox or FTP servers directly from the app – a highly requested feature I’m sure will come in handy for those large photo collections that need to go into Dropbox. Uploads in original size (and even RAW) are also supported. Multiple files at once can now be uploaded from the app’s web interface, and videos can be streamed to an Apple TV thanks to AirPlay integration (iOS 4.3 is required).

PhotoSync 1.1 is available at $1.99 in the App Store. Full changelog below. Read more

Official TED iPad App Now Supports AirPlay

We’re big fans of the official TED app for the iPad, and we’re also huge fans of Apple’s AirPlay streaming technology and the second-gen Apple TV – entirely based on streaming content from iTunes or your local network. The latest update to the TED app doesn’t introduce several new features and optimizations (the app was initially released in October 2010), but it adds one key functionality: AirPlay support for all talks and playlists.

Version 1.3 doesn’t add anything else, but it’s okay. AirPlay support for TED talks was our most requested feature, and it’s finally available. Go get the app here.