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AirPort Express Streaming Audio From Any Program

Posted by Zonk on from the showing-off-my-tmbg-collection dept.

Foobaz writes "Until now, the only application that can play audio on Apple's AirPort Express has been Apple's own iTunes. But Rogue Amoeba, makers of Audio Hijack, just released Airfoil, a program that lets you redirect anything to your AirPort Express, like streaming audio from mplayer, RealPlayer, or VLC."

7 of 261 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Sync issues by Elwood+P+Dowd · · Score: 5, Informative

    They answer that question in the FAQ. Yes, the audio will be out of sync. This can be solved with VLC or MPlayer by manually synchronizing the video and audio. This cannot be solved with DVD Player.app, RealPlayer, or anything else that won't let you decouple audio from video. There's probably nothing they can really do about this.

    --

    There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
  2. Re:Apple's not going to like this. by SpamJunkie · · Score: 5, Informative

    It probably won't be a problem, for two reasons:

    1. It's been in beta for a while, Apple could have easily done something about it earlier.

    2. It still uses iTunes. The backend uses the iTunes API to add a local stream to the library and send it to the Airport Express.

    What would really make Apple upset is if someone had discovered the key being used to encrypt the audio, but that hasn't happened here.

  3. Re:Sync issues by JonGretar · · Score: 5, Informative

    There is a sync issue with this. It's got to do with the APEX standard and nothing the DEV's can do about it.

    However. This is not a problem since VLC and MPlayer can move the sound all around. So just watch your torrents with VLC(which I guess you do anyway) and make the sound be a few seconds early. Easy peasy.

    More info at http://www.rogueamoeba.com/forum/ubb/Forum7/HTML/0 00010.html

  4. Re:Will the foil fly? by isa-kuruption · · Score: 5, Informative

    If Apple didn't like it and wanted to be proprietary, they wouldn't have used Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP), which is a well documented and supported protocol, as the transport method.

  5. Re:Audio Hijack by beej69 · · Score: 5, Informative

    they're the first high-profile implementation of the algorithm that Jon Lech Johansen reverse-engineered:
    (http://nanocrew.net/blog/apple/revairtunes.html)

    and yes... this is THAT Jon... the one that got yanked into court for reverse-engineering the DVD encryption. all hail Jon! :D

    what we need now is for mplayer and VLC and the others to implement airport express streaming directly in the media player...

  6. VLC streaming to AirPort Express by divinemac · · Score: 5, Informative
    There is an excellent article on (the excellent site) http://www.macosxhints.com/ regarding how to stream from VLC http://www.videolan.org/ to iTunes here without any additional 3rd parts apps:
    http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20041 023154910602&query=VLC

    I've been using this solution for playing DIVX files from my laptop (which is connected to my projector, while the audio is routed to AirPort Express) for some time, and works well, thanks to the author's knowledge, and the power of VLC !

  7. Re:Will the foil fly? by isa-kuruption · · Score: 5, Informative

    As explained in this blog:

    RAOP protocol itself has already been analyzed by DVDJon and its implementation is availabe as an open source C# software called JustePort. RAOP protocol is based on RTSP wrapped with AES and RSA cryptography, on which Apple Lossless files are streamed.

    AES and RSA are also open methods in conjunction with RTSP. Seems pretty open to me.