Shairport – Apple Airplay streaming for free

 Apple, Geek, Linux, TV and Hi-Fi  No Responses »
Apr 272011
 

I used a few hours of this past long weekend to have a play with the recently released program Shairport (original post and Github repository). What the program does is emulate Apple’s Airport Express. As well as being an fairly over priced wireless router and print server, the Airport Express allows you to stream music from iTunes or an iOS device wirelessly to a stereo.

If you have an Airport Express connected to every stereo in your house you can play music to them all at once, in sync, and have a relatively cheap multiroom music system.

As I have a Linux PC connected to my TV and stereo in the living room I thought I’d give it a go. Installing is very easy – you need to download a few Perl modules (perl -MCPAN -e ‘install Module::Name::Here’)

  • HTTP::Request
  • HTTP::Message
  • Crypt::OpenSSL::RSA
  • IO::Socket::INET6

Then just fire up Terminal and type

apt-get install libssl-dev libcrypt-openssl-rsa-perl libao2 libao-dev libio-socket-inet6-perl libwww-perl avahi-utils make perl shairport.pl

Easy! I’d recommend actually looking at the installation doc when you download as the code is changing everyday and the instructions above are probably already out of date. There are also instructions for installing on OS X and Windows.

So does it work? Yes it does… and surprisingly well. I’ve even created a bash script that runs on start up so I don’t lose it after reboot. I can also connect fine after waking up from hibernation so I don;’t have to have the computer running all the time.

Overall, I’m really happy as it has saved me the £90 I was considering spending on an AppleTV (which can also act as an Airport Express for streaming) just for this feature. I already have Boxee and XBMC installed on the PC and all my music on a NAS but iTunes is really my go to application for music. It doesn’t suck nearly as much on a Mac as on Windows and all my playlists and podcasts are in it. I’ll still probably pick up an Express for the bedroom as having to plug a phone or iPod in feels a bit cumbersome.

Lets just hope Apple don’t attempt to change the key and up security so this stops working. Fingers crossed!

Cancelling Lovefilm

 Film, Geek, TV and Hi-Fi  No Responses »
Apr 132011
 

After being a Lovefilm member on and off for about 4 years I’ve decided that I’m not really taking full advantage of the service and it’s not really fitting in with my life. It’s a bit sad because it’s actually a really good idea and I’ve managed to watch some films that I probably wouldn’t have without the service.

The problems really started when I bought a Blu Ray player and moved as many of the films in my queue to BR as I could. From my experience it looks like Lovefilm don’t stock as many BRs as they should. Even with 10 or so discs on my list at high priority I would still be sent a random film from my medium priority list. This wouldn’t be so bad but I usually have a lot of crap on medium priority that I added on a whim and have forgotten to take off. In the worse case I had watched the film on TV a few weeks before and forgotten to take it off so was sent a film I had seen. I know this has a lot to do with my disorganisation but when you have 10 films on high priority you expect one of them to be sent.

Another part of the Lovefilm service that I think hasn’t really reached its potential is the Lovefilm Player. Quality is really quite awful on a 42″ 1080p TV and performance on my Atom/ION HTPC is pretty terrible. 1080p YouTube videos play perfectly but the 360pish Lovefilm videos stutter horribly.

To replace Lovefilm (because we can’t do without our movies) we’ve just upgraded our Sky package to HD. We already had the movie package but with an ancient box with a tiny 40GB hard drive. Upgrading to HD means a shiny new HD box with a 320GB  hard drive (120GB reserved for Anytime) which leaves lots of room to keep recorded films. It’s also nice that every film is in HD.

So far we’ve actually managed to record a few films that we’ve had on the Lovefilm list for a while. It’s more of an effort  to catch good films when you have to trawl through pages of TV listings on the Sky website but features like Remote Record make the process a lot easier.

I’m a little sad that I’m giving more money to Sky rather than a nice company like Lovefilm but at the moment I’m just happier with the service.