VLC & Airplay.

[radwar]

I tried using airplay mirrorring from my Mac running VLC to my AppleTV to watch on the computer. However I see that the audio from the VLC app still plays through the desktop and not the TV. If I increase/decrease volume, that is heard on the TV but the actual movie audio is heard only on the mac. It i like the movie audio is sent to the mac speaker source instead of airplay. What am I missing?

[fkuehne]

VLC for Mac doesn't support AirPlay at all at this point. I've heard successful reports of using AirFoil for the audio stuff.

[aitte]

Funnily, the free AirFlick (http://ericasadun.com/ftp/AirPlay/) uses VLC internally for the transcoding.

What's required for VLC AirPlay support:

• Transcode the playing media to h.264 + AAC (easy, transcoding is already built into VLC)
• Publish the stream over HTTP (easy, this transport layer is already built into VLC)
• Publish a mDNS/zeroconf/bonjour (whatever you want to call it) service with the HTTP URL to the h.264 stream inside a .m3u8 playlist (easy, nearly all of that is already built into VLC)
• Listen as a server and accept commands such as metadata info for duration, current position, fast forward, rewind, next, etc (this is not as easy and would require mapping those commands into internal seeking functions in VLC)

So only point #4 would require any real work. VLC is very close to supporting AirPlay mirroring out of the box.

Consider now that AirPlay is by no means Mac-specific. XBMC has a built-in receiver and there are dozens of receivers for every computer platform out there.

If VLC had just a tiny bit of extra support built-in (the seeking/metadata protocol), it would be possible to insantly share videos over the network and play them back on XBMC or another AirPlay receiver.

I really wish I knew enough about VLC to program a patch, because I estimate the work to be at most 1-2 days of light tinkering, considering that complete dissections of the AirPlay protocol are out there and most of it is already built into VLC:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirPlay#Protocols (the interesting protocol is regular video/audio transmission, not the mirroring stuff, which is more complex)

It'd JUST need a tiny server inside VLC which can expose a .m3u8 playlist (leveraging the built-in HTTP server and transcoding support) and listen for the appropriate "get duration", "seek to 1:03:20", "go to next video in library" etc commands and act on them...

So close yet so far away! For now, AirFlick does the job, and uses VLC internally, so that's what I recommend to people, but it is much slower than what VLC would be able to do internally and is very, very unpolished (a more polished program is Beamer but it's a joke at $15 for a simple wrapper that uses ffmpeg internally). Note: AirFlick requires VLC 1.x for the live transcoding of non-h.264 formats, and requires this program in /usr/bin: http://mediafire.com/file/3hlnhn1h8wkaj ... msegmenter

Really, all that AirFlick is doing is:

Code: Select all

1. Run "/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC /PATH/TO/INPUT/FILE.EXT --intf=rc --sout=#transcode{vcodec=h264,vb=2048,acodec=mp4a,ab=192}:standard{mux=ts,dst=-,access=file}" 2. Serve a ".m3u8" file over HTTP and announce it via mDNS. 3. Pipe VLC's transcoded stdout into the mediastreamsegmenter for HTTP serving (even though they could have used VLC's internal server for that job, like I said, AirFlick is NOT a well designed program).

So like I said, VLC is extremely close to already supporting AirPlay completely.