AirPlay Expansion

I figured anybody who has an AppleTV 2G and an iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad/iTunes-enabled computer has tried AirPlay at one point or another. It is pretty awesome to be able to stream photos, videos, and music with one tap from the iOS device to the TV. But some of us geeks got hobble by the limitations such as:

Why can't stream from MobileSafari?
Why can't we stream from AppStore apps?


Well, those questions have been defeated by our hacker friends. AirVideoEnabler is a Cydia hack that enables video AirPlay in third-party apps on the iOS device. This opens up possibilities such as: streaming internet TV to your TV from an app, streaming from the iTunes app, and streaming from MobileSafari. Now, this only goes for video because any app that plays audio (such as Pandora) can already stream audio to the TV. AirVideoEnabler works great, streams smoothly, and is kinda fun to use.

But, wait! There's more!


So you can stream video, audio, and photos from your Mac to your TV via iTunes. But you can't stream anything outside of iTunes. Bummer....


Oh wait a second, that limitation has been defeated by Erica Sadun :)

Erica Sadun has written a great application for the Mac, called AirFlick that can stream basically anything to your AppleTV from your computer. You can stream PDFs, photos not in iTunes, video files from your computer, internet URLs, and even your screen!

And the fun doesn't stop there.


She has also written an application that allows your iOS device to stream to your Mac, in the event that you have a Mac Mini running your living room media center instead of an AppleTV 2G. It's called AirPlayer.

There are even apps that allow this in Windows, but I can't remember what they are called :P

So go have fun with your TV and your iPhone :P

You can grab Erica's apps here.
AirVideoEnabler is available in Cydia for free.

Cheers!