Comments on: AirPlay: Like AirTunes, Only More So

By: B Shore

B Shore — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 22:50:47 +0000

Any chance AirPlay doesn’t have the incredibly frustrating feature of AirTunes, where it has to re-discover the devices every time you start iTunes? The Airport Express can be set with a fixed IP, but iTunes still scans for and discovers devices every time. You ought to be able to tell iTunes what IP addresses the devices are set at, and skip this error prone process.

By: Umer

Umer — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 03:24:28 +0000

I don’t know why you are asking them to adopt an obscure open standard when the AirTunes is already based on other popular open-standards. I don’t know about what extensions they’ve done to AirPlay but AirTunes is a very simple implementation that uses Bonjour (open-standard) to discover/advertise devices/services and then uses RTP (again open-standard) to stream to the device and the content is encoded in H.264 (another open-standard). So why would want to go to something like DLNA?

Take a look at AirFoil by Rogue Amoeba because these guys have figured out the AirTunes implementation and can stream content from (lets say) VLC or any other audio source to your airport express.

By the way, @David, airplay is airtunes plus a photos, video, etc, so don’t worry, airtunes will unfortunately go away but AirPlay will do everything you did before and more.

By: David

David — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 23:22:09 +0000

will airplay and airtunes devices play nice together?

Can I have an airport express in one room and the new apple tv in another and they all appear as being on the same network and I can send music to them from the remote app?

Im worried apple will leave airtunes behind, they have a history of it.

By: Poo

Poo — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 22:46:50 +0000

Streaming to those devices? Plex.

By: striatic

striatic — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 22:26:30 +0000

any chance AirPlay could be uncoupled from iTunes? so any iPhone or iPad app could use the Apple TV as a secondary display?