AppleTV 6.0 requires Fairplay-DRM Airplay Sources (opens in new tab)

But 3rd-party software (like Rogue Amoeba's Airfoil) can offer a lot of nice features that are not present in 10.8: Routing of output from arbitrary apps to an AirPlay device (even without app-level support), simultaneous output to multiple Airplay devices throughout the home, graphic EQ, etc. etc.

And this is the typical reason I cannot take Apple anymore. I've paid for numerous RogueAmoeba software licenses over the years and they are top notch. Apple decided, screw that we'll do it how we want it - because, you know, streaming audio in your house you should be doing it exactly how we told you too.

F you Apple. Nobody has cracked the open streaming audio nut, trivial as it may be. And the rest are left with junk, proprietary crap like this.

iTunes on Windows can still do Airplay. I think a hacky solution would be to start an audio streaming server on localhost, add that source in iTunes and airplay it, and send all system audio to this local audio streaming server.

what do you mean by "the hardware to do Airplay video" what kind of hardware would you need for that?

I'm now worried that Apple will update the AirPort Express to require FairPlay for audio as well. The precedent has been set. (The Express + Airfoil makes for a really nice multiroom audio setup.)

I use plexconnect with mine and it works well. But it is a bit of a hack. I'm getting more and more convinced that switching to the roku would be better.

You can import DRM free content into iTunes with tools like iFlicks. But you are correct about the collection residing in iTunes.

You can watch any third party content you want on Apple TV so long as it's registered in iTunes and is an m4v.

That's what the "computers" tab is for.

It doesn't require that at all. I keep all of my movies and tv shows on my mac and use AirVideo to stream them to my Apple TV using my iPhone or iPad (with no hacks, jail breaks, etc)

http://www.inmethod.com

Here ya go: https://gist.github.com/qdcarnicelli/6653766

Ten seconds of running WireShark and watching iTunes talk to an AppleTV running v6 will give you something like that, where iTunes and the AppleTV do much talking about 'fp-setup' and FPLY and handshake together.

Apple's AirPlay (AirTunes) devices have actually been doing these FPLY verifications for years now, but they were optional and talking to the devices with the older non-FPLY protocol worked. It's just as of Apple TV 6.0 that they appear to be dropping the old connection exchange and requiring the FPLY one to talk to the device.

I'm not quite sure what you think we have to gain by claiming we think FairPlay is required now, when it really wasn't? This weblog post was to inform our customers about an issue with our software and ATV 6. We'd all dearly love a solution.

Apple won't help them, because Airfoil is more or less a reverse engineering of Apple's protocol, and it's one that they choose not to share. This move was deliberately made to prevent apps like Airfoil from working. For what it's worth, I'm fine with it - Apple doesn't have to open their protocols just no like one has to buy their products, and Rogue Amoeba's complaints here are the same as anyone who builds off Google's APIs - if you're not paying for the product, expect it can go away at any time, taking your revenue with it.

Try talking to Apple! Hilarious!

Apple does not help with Airfoil. They would prefer it to simply go away. Interoperability is not their thing here.

I worked on Airfoil at RA for years, including a couple of major updates and many workarounds for problems like these (although generally less severe). Apple never returned our metaphorical calls.

ChromeCast has been breaking apps written to push to it as well: http://www.engadget.com/2013/09/21/airplay-mirroring-android...

And honestly, if Google had any intention of having generally open access to it, they would have started with DLNA support, which would have allowed many phones to push to it out of the box. Instead expect it to stay heavily locked down and to only provide good support for getting users on to Chrome and Google Play.

Because if you live in the Apple ecosystem already, it makes tons of sense and is a welcomed addition to get the content you probably already have on to the one screen it wasn't yet on. My 10+ year iTunes collection sounds great coming out of my sound system, and I can control it from my iPhone. Being able to mirror my MacBook to my TV is also pretty great, and with Mavericks, it will have second-screen capability in addition to plain mirroring.

Also, iTunes content hasn't had DRM in years now, idiotic or otherwise.

It still works, Beamer uses a different part of the AirPlay protocol ‘suite’. We’ve tested with the betas to ensure it would. (I’m one of the developers.)

Yes. They just require the source to be iTunes or the Mac.

Except that Amazon just enabled AirPlay on their iOS app.