AirPlay reverse engineered to send video from iOS devices to Macs

A developer has managed to reverse the functionality of AirPlay to allow users to stream videos on their Macs using their iOS devices instead of the other way round. AirPlay, a feature introduced in iOS 4.2 for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad allowed users to stream content on their iOS devices directly from their computers. This function worked especially well with the Apple TV set top boxes that essentially gave iOS devices “DLNA”-capabilities. I use inverted commas here to emphasize that it isn’t true DLNA, but an iOS device with AirPlay enabled combined with an Apple TV can basically do the same thing. Anyway this is how the AirPlayer works:

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.

AirPlayer is still in a very early stage at the moment, and is bound to be buggy. But it doesn’t require a jailbreak of any sort to work. Head over to the developer’s website to download the program for your Mac if you wish to test it out. Let us know how it works out for you. Watch a video demo after the break: