This is rather fucked up. The author does not provide any proof that Fairplay is the reason their app is not able to play. Of course HN crowd do not need proof to bring out the pitch forks. If they can show me proof I will definitely fall in line. In fact if the guys want some help fixing their app they should try talking to Apple and not try to sensationalize things and make false accusations.
Ten seconds of running WireShark and watching iTunes talk to an AppleTV running v6 will give you something like that, where iTunes and the AppleTV do much talking about 'fp-setup' and FPLY and handshake together.
Apple's AirPlay (AirTunes) devices have actually been doing these FPLY verifications for years now, but they were optional and talking to the devices with the older non-FPLY protocol worked. It's just as of Apple TV 6.0 that they appear to be dropping the old connection exchange and requiring the FPLY one to talk to the device.
I'm not quite sure what you think we have to gain by claiming we think FairPlay is required now, when it really wasn't? This weblog post was to inform our customers about an issue with our software and ATV 6. We'd all dearly love a solution.
...perhaps Apple's intent was simply to drop support for the extremely old clients that Airfoil was emulating? That seems like a much simpler explanation to me than some sort of nefarious plan to break Airfoil.
My suspicion would be that feature was added in response to external demands (e.g, movie/TV studios required it for remote playback), and making it mandatory was a later simplification.
Apple does not help with Airfoil. They would prefer it to simply go away. Interoperability is not their thing here.
I worked on Airfoil at RA for years, including a couple of major updates and many workarounds for problems like these (although generally less severe). Apple never returned our metaphorical calls.
Ok. May be Airfoil is not big enough to bother Apple. So are you saying sensationalizing things and making false accusations is the way to go? Because all I see here is that. I don't see proof in that post.
Apple won't help them, because Airfoil is more or less a reverse engineering of Apple's protocol, and it's one that they choose not to share. This move was deliberately made to prevent apps like Airfoil from working. For what it's worth, I'm fine with it - Apple doesn't have to open their protocols just no like one has to buy their products, and Rogue Amoeba's complaints here are the same as anyone who builds off Google's APIs - if you're not paying for the product, expect it can go away at any time, taking your revenue with it.
