Introduction

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One of Apples most underrated, and as I see it most innovative and useful products, is the Airport Express.

It has three major functionalities:

• Wireless base station and router
• Wireless printer sharing
• Wireless music streaming using Apples technology “Airtunes”

Except this it is also portable, allowing you to bring it with you when traveling or going to your summer house.

The fact is that I like this product so much that I’ve actually bought 3 of them, having one in my living room, one in the kitchen and one in the bedroom, not only to extend the wireless network using WDS but above all to be able to stream music to the stereos in each room. Fantastic!

Problem

Anyway, the problem has always been the fact that Airtunes is only available using iTunes. Looking at YouTube videos, using Spotify or viewing a film has always annoyed me since it means you need to connect the computer with a cable to the home stereo.

That was until I found the application Airfoil.

Streaming audio from (almost) any application

It should be noted that this isn’t a free application, but it’s worth every penny and it’s cost of $25 (or £17/€18) is actually low for the functionality it provides.

Airfoil is an application that actually lets you stream music from any application to your preferred Airport Express.

This works very well as long as you are streaming only audio, but trying to stream audio from a video application unfortunately will render the video and audio out of sync since there is a delay when encoding the audio and sending it to the Airport Express station.

This is probably also why Apple, other than wanting to constrain people to use iTunes as primary audio application, has chosen to limit the use of Airtunes to iTunes.

There is a solution however to the video problem, which will work for the needs of most people. It will however be a solution only for external video files, as mpg, avi or wmv, and that said, it will not work for video embedded in websites as Youtube etc.

Solution

The solution is to use the Airfoil video player.

Basically the Airfoil video player is an implementation of the quicktime functionality Mac OS offers, but it delays video to sync with remote audio playback. This means that you will be able to view video with the audio wirelessly transmitted to your home stereo, using no cables what so ever.

Note that since Quicktime by default lacks support for many video and audio formats, you will probably need to install plugins to support them. In an upcoming post I’ll explain not only how to do this and point out the best solution, but also explain how to use subtitles with Quicktime, thus creating the perfect video and audio solution.