I've had an idea and as I'm pretty short on time these days I thought someone else might like to run with it (as it may take me a long time to get anything done!)
(First a bit of background)
The new Apple TV looks like pretty it could be very handy, I was considering getting one for my Dad and telling him that anything he wants is there with a Dad-friendly interface but there are a few problems… Apple hasn't garnered the rights to very many films here in the UK and there's no TV renting whatsoever! Kinda curbs my enthusiasm.
I did get to thinking though, the BBC iPlayer stuff would be pretty neat on there, but there's almost no way Jobs will provide that for such a tiny island as this!
However I've done some work with the protocol apple uses to share iTunes libraries (in Ruby, not C) and it's not very difficult to make an app which provides music and video to iTunes through it (the DAAP protocol - its just a web server which talks in binary encoded objects). I think it wouldn't be an improssible job to write code which would allow the mbed to grab a list of current BBC iPlayer videos, broadcast them to the network as an iTunes share and point the Apple TV to the iPod/iPhone versions of the streams if someone wants to watch them.
You could feasibly just pop an mbed with the required code onto any internet enabled network and all iTunes/Apple TVs would see a shared library filled with BBC shows!
You'd need to implement Apple's Bonjour zeroconf protocol, the DMAP encoding (I've written a ruby library to interpret this, so I'm part way there!) and make sure the Apple TV likes accepting streams directly from the BBC.
If anyone out there is interested in this idea please reply here! I'm going to test out the idea in Ruby (as I have almost all the background work done) and see if it could work, then I'll start trying to port it across to C.
Cheers!
JP Hastings-Spital.
2
replies
I've had an idea and as I'm pretty short on time these days I thought someone else might like to run with it (as it may take me a long time to get anything done!)
(First a bit of background)
The new Apple TV looks like pretty it could be very handy, I was considering getting one for my Dad and telling him that anything he wants is there with a Dad-friendly interface but there are a few problems… Apple hasn't garnered the rights to very many films here in the UK and there's no TV renting whatsoever! Kinda curbs my enthusiasm.
I did get to thinking though, the BBC iPlayer stuff would be pretty neat on there, but there's almost no way Jobs will provide that for such a tiny island as this!
However I've done some work with the protocol apple uses to share iTunes libraries (in Ruby, not C) and it's not very difficult to make an app which provides music and video to iTunes through it (the DAAP protocol - its just a web server which talks in binary encoded objects). I think it wouldn't be an improssible job to write code which would allow the mbed to grab a list of current BBC iPlayer videos, broadcast them to the network as an iTunes share and point the Apple TV to the iPod/iPhone versions of the streams if someone wants to watch them.
You could feasibly just pop an mbed with the required code onto any internet enabled network and all iTunes/Apple TVs would see a shared library filled with BBC shows!
You'd need to implement Apple's Bonjour zeroconf protocol, the DMAP encoding (I've written a ruby library to interpret this, so I'm part way there!) and make sure the Apple TV likes accepting streams directly from the BBC.
If anyone out there is interested in this idea please reply here! I'm going to test out the idea in Ruby (as I have almost all the background work done) and see if it could work, then I'll start trying to port it across to C.
Cheers!