iTunes AirTunes / Airport Express Client Support (XBMC frontend)
#1
originally posted in:

http://www.xboxmediaplayer.de/cgi-bin....5;st=90

Quote:as for a thought, i know that itunes can be controlled via web based interfaces, so i was wondering if there would be a way to fool the built in support for the airtunes. by this i mean, remote control an instance of itunes open on a desktop using the xbox, then select the xbox as the destination for music to be played (as if the xbox was an airport express). i think the ultimate solution for my needs is for apple to get a wi-fi remote control with lcd for their airport express thing.

anybody have any ideas? we were told to start a new topic for this idea as it was "off-topic" from the original, but reading through that is a good idea as it is closely related to this idea!
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#2
a little more explanation:

the idea would be two fold.

1) be able to emulate an airtunes express unit in xbmc on your xbox. you could then "send" music from an itunes session open on your pc or mac to your xbox using the same method as sending music to an airport express unit.

2) be able to remotely control an instance of itunes open on your pc from xbmc to do the same as above!

i have no idea if any of this is possible! i will research into remote control solutions for itunes to see how that development has come, and the present those here to see if they can be adapted to work in xbmc.
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#3
actually, come to think of it, this may not be necessary....an alternative would be to simply use the built in web interface that the fine developers have already put in the 1.0 build.

a user could then use forza's daap support to interface with itunes.

so from a desktop pc, we could simply load up the web interface (or even more exciting, from a pocketpc! :o ) to xbmc, and play our music libraries in this way.

i guess my biggest concern is drm stuff, as i have a fairly large (and growing) set of music purchased from itms. emulating a airport express would circumvent this issue, but this alternative would not!!
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#4
Big Grin 
note! i've separated all posts on drm into a new topic thread (link), please keep/move all such discussion to that thread, tia
ps! please also respect that the new drm thread or this thread on "airtunes" is not same at rendezvous, zeroconf or daap.
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#5
this maybe aids the development:

http://www.nanocrew.net/blog/
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#6
now the airport express has been hacked, im sure we could have this in xbmc!
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#7
it should be put into perspective what's been hacked here. the only thing that's been hacked is the public key that itunes uses to encrypt the data before sending it to an airport express. the private key that the airport express uses to decrypt the music has not been hacked, which prevents xbmc from pretending to be an airport express.

to put it simply, the method of encrypting music has been cracked, which allows any program to send music to an airport express - but the recieving/decrypting portion has not been cracked, which means that no program currently has the capability to "pretend" to be an airport express.

now, what might be possible is to hack itunes itself so it encrypts using a different key, one to which we have the appropriate decrypting key so we can recieve - but that's a different forum :p

this is sort of similar to the whole signed xbe thing - we don't have ms' encryption key so you can't run software on an xbox without hacking the bios in one fashion or another.

just thought a small primer might be in order. Smile
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#8
Star 
i was just thinking about what i want in xbmc and i think the best would be the ability to control the functions of xbmc from a laptop or computer. if i just want to listen to web radio or stream my itunes library through my home stereo, i don't want to turn on the tv, plugin an xbox controller and navigate through the menus to the song i want, i love how airport express integrates with itunes where you can select "home theater" as the output for the music. what if we could do that with xbmc.. picture being able toopen itunes from your computer/laptop, select xbmc as the output, and then just pick and choose the song to play!

the other option is to have a duplicate screen output sent to the computer display and you can control xbmc from the computer with your mouse like you would the xbox controller.. basically it would mean sending the video output to the computer display over the network instead of out the video output.

Huh
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#9
for reference (if some developer ever want to look into this);

quote from doom.net:
Quote:mpaa public enemy number 1, jon johansen has released justeport, a software which removes the restrictions on music broadcasting from the airport express wireless access point.
quote from www.nanocrew.net/blog (jon lech johansen's blog):
Quote:reversing airtunes
i've released justeport, a tool which lets you stream mpeg4 apple lossless files to your airport express.

the stream is encrypted with aes and the aes key is encrypted with rsa.

airport express rsa public key, modulus:
59de8qlieitsh1wgjrcfrkj6euwqi+bglox1hl3u3ghc/j0qg90u3sg/1cutwc
5voyvfdmfi6osfxi5elabwjmt2dkhzbjka3k9ok+8t9ucrqmd6dzhj2ycclldr
kskv6kdqnw4uwpdpomxzic/amj3z/luvx1g7wshcawkf1zns1elvqr+boejxub
oitnz/bdzphrtozz0dew0uowxf/+sg+nck3eqjvxqcaj/vehkivd2m+5ql71yj
q+87x6ov3eayvt3zwzyd6z5vytcrtij2vz9zmni/uaahqn9jdsbwluepvviynh
imnvvyfzecxg/idtq+x4irdixnv5heew==
exponent: aqab

md5(justeport-0.1.tar.gz (mirror)) = fe13e96751958c6e9d57cce0caa7b17b

update: justeport is not windows-only. thanks to mono it runs under gnu/linux, macos x and windows.

update: list (mirror) of all itunes rsa public keys.

download:
dedrms (mirror) - cli utility for decrypting aes encrypted mpeg4 aac files.
fairkeys (mirror) - cli utility for retrieving fairplay keys from apple's servers.
justeport (mirror) - cli utility for streaming mpeg4 apple lossless files to an airport express.
again, the legal implications/consekvenses of implementing this has to first be discussed if a patch is ever written/coded for xbmc.
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#10
since more and more people are using itunes to manage their music on a pc (or mac). i was wondering if it was technically possible to put the airport express airtunes (http://www.apple.com/airportexpress/airtunes.html) feature in to xbmc. this would allow the xbox to show up in itunes as a set of remote speakers allowing you to play the same music all over the house at the same time.

example: music playing out of pc/mac with itunes and a stereo in another room connected with an airport express and a surround sound system connected to an xbox with xbmc.

just a thought. i really would like to be able to do this.

greasyweasel
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#11
after doing some investigation last night, i discovered that you can only have your music streamed to one output at a time using itunes and the airport express. this completely removes the reason i wanted one or this feature in xbmc since i want to be able to have sync'd music streamed to multiple sources.

i have however been playing with slimserver (free) that is used to do this feature with squeezeboxes (it has itunes integration). there is a software player called softsqueeze (http://softsqueeze.sourceforge.net/) that is also free and allows mulitple players to be sync'd.

now you can already listen to a slimserver stream with xbmc by setting up a playlist to point at the http stream. however this cannot be sync'd with out players.

so the point of all this rambling, would it be possible to add the same sync feature to xbmc that is in softsqueeze (this is open source)? or is it possible to run java apps on the xbox? since softsqueeze is java based. this would allow for full sync'd music between xbox's, pc's (softsqueeze), mac's (softsqueeze) and squeezeboxes.
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#12
well i thought that it would be nice to have something like an "airport express mode" in xbmc. what i mean is that xbmc would show up like an airport express unit in itunes so that i can select music on my computer which the xbox plays.

hope i wasn't to unclear...

thanks for a great program

erik
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#13
321erik123 Wrote:have something like an "airport express mode" in xbmc. what i mean is that xbmc would show up like an airport express unit in itunes so that i can select music on my computer which the xbox plays.
Resurrecting this old thread, I'd love to see something like this. Much of the time, I use XBMC headless (with projector off) for music and such, and the web interface just doesn't cut it (maybe if it received some love, but it's been years since it has been touched).

Instead, having an option to allow iTunes control XBMC playback would be an amazing addition!
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#14
I can't say how pluginable iTunes is but streaming ie audio to XBMC via EventClients isnt supported but I for one would aswell like the addition and will look into it in the autumn.

If you use XBMC on linux you could probably use pulseaudio (so its more that you run linux than XBMC) as you can stream to that manager from every plattform from what I know. Havent tried it though.
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Do not e-mail XBMC-Team members directly asking for support. Read/follow the forum rules.
For troubleshooting and bug reporting please make sure you read this first.

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"Well Im gonna download the code and look at it a bit but I'm certainly not a really good C/C++ programer but I'd help as much as I can, I mostly write in C#."
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#15
As far as I can tell, the private key that the airport express unit uses to decrypt the incoming stream still hasn't been cracked, and probably won't ever be.

Does anyone know if this is still the case for sure? I know there's alternative options out there but what I'd REALLY like to be able to do is use my iphone's Remote app to direct output to my xbox and htpc from my desktop which actually has all my music in it, on osx, running itunes... This would require being able to 'emulate' an airport express...
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iTunes AirTunes / Airport Express Client Support (XBMC frontend)0