airvideoenabler
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AirPlay video streaming from iOS devices hacked into Macs (video)
Hey Mac home theater users, listen up -- your AirPlay wishes have come true. TUAW's very own Erica Sadun has developed a free (ad supported) 0.01 AirPlayer alpha hack that lets your Mac play host to AirPlay video streamed off of iOS devices. Right, just like an Apple TV and without requiring a Jailbreak. But as long as you're skirting official support anyway, why not install the free AirVideoEnabler app onto your jailbroken iPod touch, iPad, or iPhone to stream video from even more applications than Apple currently allows. Works for us. Everyone else can check the video after the break.
AirVideoEnabler ready for jailbroken iPhones/iPads, streams video to Apple TV
Apple's much-awaited AirPlay service disappointed a lot of users when it shipped without API access for third-party apps -- you can only send video from iOS devices out to the Apple TV from Apple-blessed apps like Video and YouTube. But that hasn't stopped hackers from trying to figure out how to share more video across that AirPlay connection, and here they've gone and done it. Above, you can see a jailbreak app called AirVideoEnabler in action, that will push out video from any iOS app (including Safari) to the Apple TV. The app was supposed to be for sale in the Cydia store, but the creator, TUAW commenter Zone-MR, says he's decided to make it free instead. You can add it from his repo, or look for it on your favorite repository soon. Of course, the catch here is that you'll need to be running a jailbroken iOS device, which means it can't really be a mainstream patch in terms of fixing Apple's AirPlay deficiencies. And if, like our own Victor Agreda, you wanted to stream this video to anything other than an Apple TV (like a MacBook or any other connected device), this solution won't help you there, either. But it's a sharp demonstration of what the hacker community can do, even over Thanksgiving weekend. Maybe if it's this simple for Zone-MR to pull off, Apple will see fit to bless the AirPlay APIs for use in App Store apps soon.
AirVideoEnabler hack brings AirPlay video to the rest of your apps
Apple's new AirPlay video streaming functionality is great... unless you want to use it in a non-Apple app. For whatever reason, Apple is restricting AirPlay video to just its first party apps right now, and not even all of those (Safari is left out, for instance). Interestingly, Apple actually built the functionality in, it's just not enabled. Thanks to some "spelunking" work by TUAW's Erica Sadun, it was discovered that a single line of code is all that's necessary to spread the feature to any app that relies on Apple's MediaPlayer framework, including VLC, AirVideo, and even Safari. Now Zone-MR has built a hack called AirVideoEnabler and put it on Cydia, allowing you to bring this functionality to your own jailbroken iPad. For the hack-averse, let's hope Apple catches up in functionality soon. Check out a video of AirVideoEnabler and Erica's original hack in action after the break.
