trimeplay

Airplay server for Roku.

Somewhat experimental at this stage. Probably usable if you're willing to ignore a few problems. If you have a Roku, you can try it by going to https://owner.roku.com/add/2XQQN but be aware that the version installed here may lag behind the version in git!

Things that work:

• Viewing photos
• Changing the photo you are looking at
• Stopping photo viewing
• Viewing videos from the Video app. Only ones without DRM!
• Starting videos mid-stream
• Viewing videos from third parties, such as youtube (Again, only without DRM)
• Pausing and resuming video
• Stopping videos
• Playing some videos from websites such as PBS.org (whether it works depends on the format of the video somewhat)

What does not (because either it never will or I have no interest in doing it)

• Anything with DRM
  • That includes mirroring, surprisingly! That's a shame really: I might try and get mirroring off the never-to-be-done list, but it seems unlikely to happen :(
• Slideshow transitions (Don't care)
• Music (not really interested. The protocol is very complicated, which is surprising given how simple video is?)

What doesn't work but should (ie, bugs)

• the screensaver will still come on if you're looking at a photo. I don't know if this is a bug or a feature?

What could be done

• I should probably send a packet out if the channel exits to kill the airplay announcement. Can I, though? It doesn't look like there is any opportunity
• Eval() may be able to be used to catch some errors at the expense of making everything much slower. Might still be fast enough? Maybe I can call Eval() on the top level?

What I haven't tested

• Connecting more than one iDevice at once. It will probably just crash/freeze/choke in some other way

LICENSE:

Copyright (C) 2013 Matt Lilley

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

Some rants about BrightScript

I'm amazed at the quality of applications people CAN produce using this language. It has a few nice features, but is astonishingly lacking in some really central areas.

• I cannot believe that I can't get the duration of a video out of an roVideo{Player,Screen}. That just beggars belief.
• It's a shame that a media-centric device cannot give me more information about MP4 streams in general. I had to write an MP4 decoder from scratch to parse the files and get out the timescale and duration.
• I'm disappointed that everything is coerced to a float. It makes integer arithmetic risky at best. I had to write an arbitrary-precision arithmetic module to get the duration of a video, since I was asking the http server for larger and larger ranges of data, and eventually I ended up crossing a bit boundary and getting negative integers. Yes, I had to write my own functions to ADD TWO NUMBERS TOGETHER RELIABLY. Wow. Just, wow.
• It's bizarre that str(3) returns " 3" and not "3". I know that there's 3.toStr(), but only because it is mentioned in an example on the Brightscript Reference Page. Not because it was documented. The roFloat page (which itself is a challenge to find) says that ifFloat only implements GetFloat and SetFloat. It doesn't actually say what these functions do, though.
• There is no easy way to find out the status of a socket. I don't know why this is so hard: There are a million functions you have to call to check the statuses, and sockets seem to never return true to isConnected(), even when they clearly are.
• There's also no easy way to find out that your connection has been dropped. I still can't figure out if this is even possible!
• I misspelled invalid as invlaid once, and validation succeeded, but the entire system crashes when it executes it.