AirPlayer Brings iDevice To Mac Streaming Capabilities

After unleashing AirPlay for all our apps, TUAW's Erica Sadun is back at it again with a new, sweet hack, for you to (air)play with. It's called AirPlayer, and in a nutshell it's a Mac app that will make your iDevices (on the same Wi-Fi network) believe your Mac is an Apple TV. This in turn will allow you to actually AirPlay videos from them onto your Mac, with both sound and video. You've probably heard all about AirPlay, Apple's new feature that allows you to stream audio, and sometimes video, wirelessly from your iDevice to an Airport Express or an Apple TV. Yet, many of you might not have had the chance to try it out yet (if you don't have the necessary hardware). Well, thanks to Ms. Sedun now you can. At this point, it's really a proof of concept more than anything else. AirPlayer is very unstable and won't be easy to get to work. For example, I wasn't able to stream from the Video app directly in the player. AirPlayer did, however, copy a working link to my clipboard which worked just fine in VLC. YouTube on the other hand, worked flawlessly.

Regardless, it's a very impressive piece of work, and will certainly be fun, especially if you haven't been able to test AirPlay until now. Also, it shows us the future for possible AirPlay implementations. We can't wait for the time when you'll be able to AirPlay anything and anywhere. In the meantime, you can get AirPlayer now, directly on Erica Sedun's website, free of charge (but ad-sponsored). This kind of tool would be great for the Mac App Store, but don't expect that to happen anytime soon. Check it out, and tell us what you think.

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