Miracast - Airplay for non-apple devices
#16
OK, so no chance of it happening unless a kindly sole can donate a copy of the spec.
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#17
They made an open standard that requires open source groups to pay to see? :eyeroll: insert xkcd comic about standards.
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#18
Its a shame that this isn't a free open spec, but the functionality would be great in my opinion.

I would be willing to help financially if it can become a reality.
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#19
E.S.R.Labs are working on somthing (Android Transporter) they plan to make compatible to miracast. Maybe there is a chance of "sharing" the specs - but i am no coder, so this is just a guess Wink
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#20
One of those "must have" features if I ever saw one......
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#21
(2012-10-31, 17:43)natethomas Wrote: They made an open standard that requires open source groups to pay to see? :eyeroll: insert xkcd comic about standards.

Kindof similar story with DLNA, they had upnp which is fully open and easy to read spec and then they expand upon that open standard with weird codes and charge quite a bit for the spec sheet for those codes Smile
Weird when the goal of the protocol is for devices to communicate easily that they add these weird ass half closed specs, adds nothing but makes it harder to communicate Smile
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#22
(2012-10-30, 04:31)bnevets27 Wrote: +1
Just had my friend use his iphone with airplay on my XBMC and I was a little jealous. Would love to have a comparable feature for android!

Old though this may be, I just wanted to address this point as nobody else seemed to pick it up.

1. You already do have an equivalent Android (and indeed any platform, as its an open standard rather than Apple proprietary) feature.
2. Miracast is *not* Airplay for non-Apple devices.
3. The open equivalent - that has been around for 10 years, and has been available for XBMC for 6 years, and Android pretty much within a year of it being launched, so I guess 3-4 years - ie long before Apple brought out AirPlay - is called UPNP AV/DNLA
4. NOTE: AirPlay MIrroring is a completely different technology!! It IS equivalent to Miracast.

In brief - UPNP AV media streaming/DLNA is a layer 3 streaming technology. So is AirPlay. Miracast and AirPlay Mirroring is a point-to-point layer 2 technology. That means it is very limited - all it is doing is taking mirroring the digital stream that the video subsystem is putting out to the local display, and spitting that out over the WiFi interface to a compatible receiver. Even without any HDCP or DRM, the only thing you can do is 'mirror' your device to another display.

Basic AirPlay isn't really a good example of the difference, because it doesn't really do a great deal more, but that is more about Apple's philosophy than the fundamental architecture. So compare: DLNA - this is not 'mirroring' anything at all. You can stream any media (photos, audio, video, and theoretically extend it to any other content you wish). It has nothing to do with what is on-screen on your local device. There are loads of DLNA/UPNP AV apps on both the Play store and iTunes store. For Android I would recommend Bubble UPNP. DLNA can be streaming in the background from your device, and you can carry on web browsing, reading emails, whatever, as it isn't dependant on mirroring your display like AirPlay Mirroring or Miracast. You can stream from anything to anything, and control that stream from anywhere else - Eg, I have often used my Android phone to tell my Android tablet to stream a song to my main XBMC media centre. The tablet and XBMC handle it from there, the handset merely controls it. But I can then, with the same handset, switch and tell my Synology NAS to stream a different song to my Squeezebox Boom in the back garden. And theoretically I can continue setting up, controlling, or terminating as many streams as I like, from anywhere to anywhere. A single device could easily be the source and/or destination of multiple streams. None of this is possible with Miracast or AirPlay Mirroring.

DLNA essentially uses UPNP as a discovery service to find DLNA devices (sources/sinks/control points), this is a discovery service similar to ZeroConf (which Apple rebranded Bonjour, but is in fact not Apple technology and it open). It then uses this information to set up connections to stream media over and send commands (stop, start, volume, etc) to remote devices.

Hope this helps.
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#23
Thanks colinjones for the nice explanation. For some reason I was always put off by UPNP/DLNA but now you got me interested in playing with it. I think it could help me do some things I've always thought about doing.
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#24
Hi colinjones & thanks for your explanation!

(2013-02-22, 00:27)colinjones Wrote: Old though this may be, I just wanted to address this point as nobody else seemed to pick it up.

1. You already do have an equivalent Android (and indeed any platform, as its an open standard rather than Apple proprietary) feature.
2. Miracast is *not* Airplay for non-Apple devices.
3. The open equivalent - that has been around for 10 years, and has been available for XBMC for 6 years, and Android pretty much within a year of it being launched, so I guess 3-4 years - ie long before Apple brought out AirPlay - is called UPNP AV/DNLA
4. NOTE: AirPlay MIrroring is a completely different technology!! It IS equivalent to Miracast.

In brief - UPNP AV media streaming/DLNA is a layer 3 streaming technology. So is AirPlay. Miracast and AirPlay Mirroring is a point-to-point layer 2 technology. That means it is very limited - all it is doing is taking mirroring the digital stream that the video subsystem is putting out to the local display, and spitting that out over the WiFi interface to a compatible receiver. Even without any HDCP or DRM, the only thing you can do is 'mirror' your device to another display.

Basic AirPlay isn't really a good example of the difference, because it doesn't really do a great deal more, but that is more about Apple's philosophy than the fundamental architecture. So compare: DLNA - this is not 'mirroring' anything at all. You can stream any media (photos, audio, video, and theoretically extend it to any other content you wish). It has nothing to do with what is on-screen on your local device. There are loads of DLNA/UPNP AV apps on both the Play store and iTunes store. For Android I would recommend Bubble UPNP. DLNA can be streaming in the background from your device, and you can carry on web browsing, reading emails, whatever, as it isn't dependant on mirroring your display like AirPlay Mirroring or Miracast. You can stream from anything to anything, and control that stream from anywhere else - Eg, I have often used my Android phone to tell my Android tablet to stream a song to my main XBMC media centre. The tablet and XBMC handle it from there, the handset merely controls it. But I can then, with the same handset, switch and tell my Synology NAS to stream a different song to my Squeezebox Boom in the back garden. And theoretically I can continue setting up, controlling, or terminating as many streams as I like, from anywhere to anywhere. A single device could easily be the source and/or destination of multiple streams. None of this is possible with Miracast or AirPlay Mirroring.

DLNA essentially uses UPNP as a discovery service to find DLNA devices (sources/sinks/control points), this is a discovery service similar to ZeroConf (which Apple rebranded Bonjour, but is in fact not Apple technology and it open). It then uses this information to set up connections to stream media over and send commands (stop, start, volume, etc) to remote devices.

Hope this helps.

That's the same I found - DLNA is great for simply transferring non-DRM encoded movies to XBMC.
I had good experience with an App called "Shortbeam" for Android and "Skifta" on iPhone.

The three key limitations with DLNA (from my point of view) are:
  • Some DLNA Apps are extremely low quality and hard to use. I connected an iPhone to XBMC using a private WiFi network (P2P) and lots of the Apps failed (for whatever reason, maybe because the advertisements didn't load anymore) :-)
  • DRM content cannot be transferred. Try for example to stream a iTunes music video from your iPhone to XBMC.
  • The video codec remains unchanged. So if you have a really exotic video on your phone and stream it to XBMC, you might run into trouble.

From my research, Miracast isn't that easy to implement either:
  • You need a chipset which supports the decoding and protocol (it's on layer 3, using WiFi direct)
  • It includes DRM functionality like you mentioned, that most probably needs to be done in hardware as well
  • Miracast connects on a 2.4Ghz band, but uses the 5Ghz band to transfer the contents
  • And your software stack has to be ready, Android 4.2+ is

IMHO the biggest benefit of Airplay / Miracast is that it streams everything and is embedded in the operating system.
Yes yes, simple screen mirroring, but that means Google Play Movies, iTunes Movies, YouTube, Netflix - all of that works out of the box on the big screen.

Hope this is interesting to some of you & please correct and extend this if you know more. I'm keen to learn. :-)

EDIT: http://www.wi-fi.org/files/20110421_Chin..._merge.pdf - get's interesting from page 177.
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#25
I completely forgot about this thread after someone mentioned BubbleUpnP to me somewhere else. As ColinJones mentioned its great!
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#26
Thank you for the explanation of upnp.

My question which i've tried to find the answer to is if you can stream spotify (for example) from an android phone to xbmc.

As it is now, I listen to my music via an iPad which streams spotify to xbmc with AirPlay. In the future I might switch to an android tablet but i'd hate to lose this functionality.

Is there a way? Sure, local content is streamable. How about streaming-content? Which more and more things are changing into.
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#27
(2013-03-12, 11:08)Camelen Wrote: Thank you for the explanation of upnp.

My question which i've tried to find the answer to is if you can stream spotify (for example) from an android phone to xbmc.

As it is now, I listen to my music via an iPad which streams spotify to xbmc with AirPlay. In the future I might switch to an android tablet but i'd hate to lose this functionality.

Is there a way? Sure, local content is streamable. How about streaming-content? Which more and more things are changing into.

hmmm, well at least in theory you could do this. But the UPNP/DLNA app would need to support taking an existing stream and encapsulating it within the DNLA stream. Unfortunately, I have no idea whether this type of app exists, as I have no use for it. Frankly, it is awfully contrived and involved, don't you think. I realise you may like the app's interface, and/or it has a specific feature you want to use, however doing this directly on XBMC, IMO, is so much a better solution that for me at least it vastly outweighs any down sides. You are wanting, first, to stream the media off the Internet over your WiFi to your phone/tablet, then back off that device, back over the WiFi, to XBMC for playback. Not only do you loose any realistic control on XBMC, but you are completely dependent on your device as the middle man. It has to continue working, it potentially could interfere with your use of other aspects of the device at the same time (be inconvenient), you need to consider battery life if you are doing this a lot or for long periods, must stay within WiFi range (can't pop out to the shops for a packet of cigarettes and take your phone with you!) Etc.

Why not just install a Spotify add-in on XBMC and cut out all that complexity?

The short version is - if Spotify were to add a DNLA Media Server endpoint on their app, this would be easy to do. It is a limitation of the app rather than the protocol (although it would be nice if Android added a system-wide end point that would capture all audio out in this way..)

As a complete aside, if you wanted to get really pointy-headed about this - you could build the Android port of PulseAudio (sound system virtual device, cross platform) onto your rooted Android device. That would then allow you to bind its audio source out, to any PulseAudio sync in on the XBMC device, but that's really pushing shit up hill!
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#28
Yeah I know it's kinda backwards. Streaming to the ipad and then to xbmc. But the ability to use the interface of spotify on the ipad and listen to it on my audio system is unparallelled. This is not possible to get with a native spotify addon to xbmc. Maybe not impossible but it's highly unlikly that someone would make this, and I don't have the knowledge to.

This is what AirPlay has been able to do for ages which uPnP hasn't. It has support for *insert app name here*.

I still think that using Spotify on XBMC conveniently is impossible without an iOS device, preferably an iPad. Searching for songs is a pain, navigating everything in a tree-structure is a pain. Especially if you use a universal remote to control XBMC.

I would love to have it on android though, since i wouldn't be stuck with an iPad. Which I feel like I am.

Thank you for the effort of your response though Smile

Edit: Oh, by the way. Ofcourse batterytime might be an issue. But a tablet has batterylife of like 10h music (very rough estimate) or more and I can slide it down in the charger for a while as well. That one I wouldn't bring to the shop either since it's my tablet and not my phone.
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#29
(2013-03-12, 11:08)Camelen Wrote: Thank you for the explanation of upnp.

My question which i've tried to find the answer to is if you can stream spotify (for example) from an android phone to xbmc.

As it is now, I listen to my music via an iPad which streams spotify to xbmc with AirPlay. In the future I might switch to an android tablet but i'd hate to lose this functionality.

Is there a way? Sure, local content is streamable. How about streaming-content? Which more and more things are changing into.

It has nothing to do with XBMC but Chromecast is a solution. No Spotify support yet but you can still do it via the AirCast-app.

Edit: One should probably wait until the Chromecast SDK has been released.
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#30
(2012-10-30, 05:15)BORIStheBLADE Wrote: I agree! This would be a great addition to XBMC.

+1 Agree too!
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