I had a friend recently tell me about how he was using a tool called rPlay to airplay his apple devices through his raspberry pi. As a guy who is always looking to save $67 I decided to give it a try.
After configuring it I couldn’t get it to work and after some investigation I found an error message that rplay couldn’t connect to test.vmlite.com on port 9080. Since I practice egress filtering on my home network I wasn’t surprised that it didn’t work.
After a network reconfiguration I was now rPalying to my office TV. I was actually impressed by how well it worked.
I was also running tcpdump port 9080 -i eth0 -w 9080.pcap at the same time to see what was so important that my raspberry pi had to talk to test.vmlite.com.
Come to find out it was so that it could do this:
According to the Unofficial AirPlay Protocol Specification rPlay is basically forwarding everything you do while using rPlay to a server running off a residential DSL line in California.
I would suggest if you need to airplay you stop using rPlay and do yourself a favor and spend the $67 on an Apple TV.
