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How to hack AirPlay video back to your Mac

By , Tuesday, Dec 14, 2010 at 3:03 pm
10

AirPlay hacked back to your Mac

TUAW's Erica Sadun, if ever a wiz there was, has once again hacked away at Apple's iOS 4.2 AirPlay feature and created an app called AirPlayer that gets it to stream video from iPhone or iPad to the Mac.

What AirPlayer does is create and advertise a custom Bonjour AirPlay service that pretends to be an Apple TV. Bonjour is Apple's zero configuration networking solution for allowing devices and applications to communicate with each other over local area networks. When Apple created AirPlay, it basically set up a new way for Apple TV to interact with iOS using Bonjour communications.

She's not a Windows dev but says in theory the same thing should be possible on that platform and perhaps Linux as well.

You don't need to Jailbreak to try this out (the app runs on your Mac, not your iPhone or iPad) but if you're not Jailbroken and running AirVideoEnabler you'll be limited to YouTube and iPod/Videos for your streaming (AirVideoEnabler lets 3rd party apps stream AirPlay video as well).

If you want to try it out, you can get AirPlayer from Erica's website, below. Video after the break!

[AirPlayer, TUAW]

Rene Ritchie

Editor-in-Chief of iMore, Executive Producer at Mobile Nations, co-host of Iterate and ZEN and TECH, cook, grappler, photon wrangler.

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  1. Gage says:

    Works pretty good, thanks. If only it worked with Apple apps too and not just video.

  2. Geo Coldz says:

    Who names their Mac Banana?

  3. Kevin says:

    how did you change your thing to banana my thing for airplay is just c-76 and some numbers also if you are jailbroken you can have airplay in any app.

  4. lawls says:

    not working for me.. any tips? tried on multiple devices

  5. chrishawn says:

    now if only it did audio as well.. and could be run as a background service.. then i could send music to my macmini entertainment center

  6. Avenged110 says:

    Sweet. Pretty cool little thing there.

  7. akp says:

    Does not work on Leopard (yet?)

  8. TJ Draper says:

    Only works for video, not audio. Audio is almost the only use I would have for it. I use a Mac Mini for my media center, and anything I would want to watch I'm probably going to watch from there anyway. But my music or audio books are probably already going on my iPhone, and when I get home or whatever, I just want to be able to send it to my Mac Mini.

  9. Dionte says:

    it works well, very nice, wish it worked on windows

  10. Jz says:

    Did that breakdancer kill a baby?!?! I don't understand why you'd need to do this. Can't you just load YouTube on the computer? Seems redundant.

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