Airplay on old Apple TV

tmartine wrote:

but i would think that if it was Apple straight up, just arbitrarily disabling appleTV 1 from receiving AirPlay.. i would think that would have come out when the hack was developed. e.g. if the hack was to just simply get the appleTV 1 to identify itself as an apple TV 2.. surely someone would have reported that...

Can't believe how many posts are being pulled from this thread...

As you say, it would have been noticed if Apple decided to disable Airplay on atv1. One thing I am in agreement with other people on this thread is that some level of development would have to be done to get atv1 to work with iOS devices. My argument is and always has been, that the level of development - for a company that has worked so long with streaming and has developed it's own means of handshaking devices - would have been straightforward and not very costly at all.

It's important to note that the app that is being touted here wasn't built specifically to add functionality to the old atv. Rather it's an upgrade to an existing app that communicates with your mac to remotely take control of it. This rather makes me think that it wasn't exactly a nightmare to get it working. Now if a third party developer can do it like that, then it would have been nice of Apple to devote a few man hours to the job too, where no doubt it would have taken substantially less time.

Why should they, some ask? It's called customer relations and keeping people sweet and happy. A year down the line, well fair enough, then I'd be happy to let it go, but this device was for sale only a very short time ago. Apple do have a history of supporting legacy devices to a level, it would have been nice if they'd have made the effort to support this too.



Anyway

...that is a lot of posts isn't it?

as an owner of both 1st and 2nd gen appleTVs i respectfully disagree.. i want the AppleTV team spending every second of every minute of every hour of everyday working on appleTV 2.. appleTV 2 has some great features, but it is no where near as polished and refined a product as appleTV 1.. appleTV 1 still works great for me for what it is and does..

there are a tonne bugs in appleTV 2 and refinements that are present in appleTV 1 that are annoyingly not in appleTV 2 (e.g. grouping episodes of TV shows and series, grouping of movie series etc.. unchecked items appear on appleTV 2 greyedout.. ***?. etc, etc).. these fixes needs to get fixed.. airPlay needs to get fixed to work with all video and audio content and be more reliable and robust and maybe even expanded to add the ability of throwing games up on the big screen etc.. and as i said, as an owner of both devices, that's what i want them working on.. with no distractions.. i want them looking forward not looking back..

my appleTV 1 works great.. Apple, get your butts in gear and refine appleTV 2 up to the level of appleTV 1 as a bare minimum..

Message was edited by: tmartine

capaho wrote:
That is precisely the problem. AirPlay is a software application, it uses various protocols to perform various tasks, but the application itself is not a protocol. HTTP and IMAP that you mentioned previously are protocols for sending and receiving hypertext data and mail data respectively across networks, and they are independent of any specific applications, although many applications use them. Understand the difference?

I do understand the difference but I would still maintain that AirPlay is a protocol. It may also be the name of a component of iOS and OSX but it uses a proprietary protocol to stream the audio. several sites are working on reverse engineering this and successfully so it seems.

but that aside, think of the officially licensed AirPlay devices like the denon amp, or the new B&W zeppelin. Apple won't have written the code for those platforms. they're very unlikely to be running the same processor. They'll have handed denon, B&W and whoever else the specification for the protocol and told them to make it work, then tested it. They may have had some reference C code for the 3rd parties to look at and change but it'll be the third parties who write the apps and make it compatible with the proprietary data stream coming in.

Now this data stream will make use of standards within it, like apple lossless, mp4, RTSP etc, but the protocol itself is not a public and open one, and support of that protocol and the bits around it (like mDNS) will be what makes things work.

David

I agree. Apple would be derelict in its duty to both its stockholders and buyers of the new Apple TV if they were to divert resources from addressing issues with the new Apple TV in order to add a free new feature to a discontinued product that has already had many updates and is working quite and doing what it was designed and advertised to do.

tmartine wrote:
AntwerPeter, you comment makes absolutely no sense whatsoever... did you read what you wrote before you pressed send?

you have a hack that works by adding code to the appleTV, with absolutely no changes whatsoever to the iOS device.. and then you say this..

I think his comment makes complete sense. what he said was that code was added to make video streaming work, but that no (or extremely little) code would need to be added to make audio streaming work as it already works with the Airport Express.

as someone else said.. who would spend $50-60 for this hack when the new appleTV with airPlay + Netflix + $.99 rentals etc cost only $99? does that make sense?? not to me..

because you don't need to pay $60. I own a 1st gen ATV and I haven't spent any extra on it, and certainly not £101 (which is somewhat more the $99 US price of the ATV2).

david

you are speaking Greek to me 🙂

what does this even mean?

"Delete the entry for that host in the known_hosts file (or delete the known_hosts file altogether) and you should be able to connect."

and where is "known_hosts" file and how do you do that?

I do understand the difference but I would still maintain that AirPlay is a protocol. It may also be the name of a component of iOS and OSX but it uses a proprietary protocol to stream the audio.

You seem to be saying that an application is a protocol because it uses protocols.

and where is "known_hosts" file and how do you do that?

Open the terminal application and enter the following command:

vi ~/.ssh/known_hosts

You should then see one or more entries that begin with a host name or IP address. Use the arrow keys on your keyboard to move the cursor to the line that begins with "appletv.local" and type dd. The line beginning with appletv.local should disappear.

Next hit the colon key and the cursor should move down to the bottom left of the terminal window next to the colon. Type wq and then hit the return key and that should do it.

thanks.. actually I finally contacted support @ the maker of the app? Name was Pratrik.

He told me how to off the "known-hosts" and now I know it's thru using Terminal. No one said that... I looked in my user files.. nothing called "know-hosts".

So now I guess it installed... but how do I stream anything from my iPad/iPhone? This is so un-Apple-like.... more PC-like. So still stuck here. I can move things using my iPhone/iPad in AppleTV, but I could do that before.

The main thing: the ONLY thing I wanted was to being able to walk in the house with something I shot on my iPhone and play it wirelessly/stream it to AppleTV. Still can't do that.

The key point is that the even older AirPort expresses can receive audio streams via AirPlay without any software update whatsoever.

AirPort Express firmware is not relevant to AirPlay and the ATV1. ATV1 software predates AirPlay by a considerable amount of time and was written to restrict streaming sources to local iTunes libraries and the sources available directly from the ATV1 menu as part of its DRM scheme. It simply does not contain the code necessary to accept a stream from a mobile iOS device using AirPlay. If it did the much discussed third-party hack wouldn't be necessary for that third-party AirPlay simulation app to work.

If you have it installed and can move stuff with your ipod/iphone/ipad go to the video or music that you want to stream to the AppleTV and press play on your device, you'll see an icon for streaming above the volume - press that and it'll give you the option of the appletv, press it and you'll start streaming to the appletv.

tmartine wrote:
AntwerPeter, you comment makes absolutely no sense whatsoever... did you read what you wrote before you pressed send?

you have a hack that works by adding code to the appleTV, with absolutely no changes whatsoever to the iOS device.. and then you say this..

+"Apple doesn't need to change anything on the 1gen ATV to get audio Airplay streaming ... If something needs to be fixed then this should be done at the IOS part not at the ATV part since audio streaming still works perfectly from within iTunes."+

the fact that the hack works by adding code to the appleTV with no change whatsoever to the iOS device proves quite unequivocally that changes are necessary to the appleTV to get this work.. think about it for even 5 seconds and i'm sure you'll figure it out..

as someone else said.. who would spend $50-60 for this hack when the new appleTV with airPlay + Netflix + $.99 rentals etc cost only $99? does that make sense?? not to me..

I would like to clarify my statement:
The reason why I don't buy the ATV2 is that it is a streaming only device. It doesn't have a HD. This means that I have to have a PC/MAC/ running for it to play music. On the ATV1 I have all my music on the internal harddrive and with remote app on the iPad I can perfectly select the playlist I want to play. Also from what I hear and read streaming to the ATV2 is far from flawless.....

The reason why I hacked my ATV1 is that I wanted to have XBMC on it. All the content I play via XBMC is stored on a NAS. XBMC pulls the files from here. This is something the ATV2 also can't do. You need to have iTunes or an IOS4.2 device to stream music to it. Also note that I am not speaking of Video, just music. Also note that you can download a free patchstick from here http://patchstick.wikispaces.com/PatchStickBuilder so no need to spend $50.
The remoteHD app costs $5.99 and can be used to remote control your Mac, PC and ATV1. If you use the remoteHD on the ATV1 you get the ATV1 user interface on your iPad so you don't need to turn on you TV set to manipulate the ATV. This app is only a kind of VNC/Remote desktop app. But these guys are able to have the ATV1 appear in the standard streaming pull down box on an IOS4.2 device. The weirdest part is that now you can even stream video an pictures to your ATV1.

The ATV1 CAN receive out of the box music streams send from iTunes. This is no new functionality. So the ATV1 is capable of receiving music streams. This means that NOTHING has to be changed on the ATV1. The only thing that needs to be done is adding the existing iTunes way of streaming to the ATV1 into Airplay (if this is an extra functionality). Since IOS is still in development this shouldn't be so hard to do in the future. And I am convinced that the ATV1 uses the same streaming protocol/way as the Airport Express devices which can receive audio streams via IOS devices. My guess is that the ATV1's are blocked from being seen in the streaming device lists because Apple wants us to move over to the ATV2.

The only thing Apple can do is clarify on this whole situation because now there is a lot of speculation going around. But I don't think they will do so because they can't give a valid reason without offending there existing ATV1 users, or worse users who upgrade to ATV2 because of the streaming issue.

Greetings
Peter

Message was edited by: AntwerPeter

My guess is that the ATV1's are blocked from being seen in the streaming device lists because Apple wants us to move over to the ATV2.

There is absolutely no rational basis for such an assumption.

AntwerPeter wrote:
The ATV1 CAN receive out of the box music streams send from iTunes. This is no new functionality. So the ATV1 is capable of receiving music streams. This means that NOTHING has to be changed on the ATV1.

Sorry, but that is faulty reasoning. You can't argue that because an ATV1 which has had its software modified can receive a music stream, the ATV1 "out of the box" is capable of receiving music streams. Of course, there is no doubt that the ATV1 hardware is capable of receiving a music stream; but this is not at issue. I know that you would like to believe that Apple intentionally blocked this capability (while mysteriously choosing to state in a Support document that ATV1 would do this), but you clearly have no actual knowledge of whether the modifications to your ATV1 reversed a block or worked around a bug.

The thing is, you are quick to rule out other people's opinions or hypothesis, but clearly can't come up with one of your own, or claiming a different explanation but without facts.

Either way, this sort of comment is just FUD, maybe more than what other people honest beliefs that this might be indeed a marketing issue. Or not.