Live Stream LDS General Conference to Apple TV (Updated)
[Update]
There was a problem with wordpress auto converting some of the single quotes in the code that you copy and paste. I have updated it and tried it again and it appears to work. Let me know if you have problems. Enjoy conference!
See all photos at the bottom.
This took all of the first session today, I finally got it working at the end of the last talk but I will be able to enjoy this for the rest of the sessions.
Please give me a link if this works for you as it will help to get the word out. You can link this page on your facebook or twitter but I would be happy to know if this helped other people.
Things needed.
- iPhone(4?) – not sure if the 4 is required but thats all I have
- Apple TV2
Verify that your network is setup correctly. You should be able to go to lds.org in safari on your web browser, and select to watch General Conference. This will will bring you to the page shown below.
From here you can click on the play button and it should start playing the video. At this point if your network is setup right and your atv2 is on, you should see the airplay button. You can then select to play on the apple tv.
At this point you will probably notice that only the audio is transfered and no video. This is the purpose of this post. To get the video to play as well requires the use of a bookmarklet. These are javascript applications that are run on top of an existing website (lds.org). What it does is tell safari to send not only the audio, but also tells it to send the video when you tell it to send to the apple tv.
To setup the bookmarklet open safari on your iphone do the following.
- Open Safari on your iphone
- Browse to this page
- Copy the following code (notice it does not look like it copies it all, but it does)
javascript:d=document,e=d.createElement('script');e.src='http://bendodson.com/bookmarklets/ios-airplay.js?'+(new%20Date()*1);void(d.body.appendChild(e));
- Open your bookmark menu
- Add a new bookmark
- Edit the bookmark url and instead of the web address paste in the code you copied before
- Save the bookmark
Thats all you need to do to get the bookmarklet setup.
From here it is simple. Go again to lds.org, watch conference. When the page loads and you see the big play button on the video, before you click it, open up your bookmarks and select to open your bookmarklet (as if you were going to that bookmarked page). Instead of taking you to a new page this will reload the video. Once the play button appears again you will now be able to click play, select your apple tv to stream to and you are now enjoying the conference on your apple tv. You will probably want to plug in your iphone so it stays charged up while watching conference.
All the credit for this post goes to two sites, the first that had the solution, and the second which is more important, the person who actually wrote the bookmarklet. Big thanks to him!
http://leimobile.com/fix-airplay-audio-only-enable-any-html-5-video-over-airplay/
http://bendodson.com/weblog/2011/01/13/enabling-any-html5-video-to-work-over-airplay-e-g-vimeo/
Hi!
I was excited to see your hack considering I don’t have cable and didn’t want to gather my family around our Mac this weekend to watch conference
I have tried to get this to work a few times and it will only play the audio. When I click the bookmark it doesn’t reload the video. Any suggestions?
The only thing I can think of would be to double check that the code that you put into the bookmark is copied over correctly, make sure no whitespaces get added to it before or after. When I did it, I copied it into notepad and then did a select to make sure there were no spaces and it seemed to work. You will need to be on the conference page where it has the play button (not actually streaming yet) and then open and select your book mark. For me, the video box disappeared for a second and came right back, and after that it worked fine.
Same problem entered link manually as well as cut and paste but does not work usin iPad 1 an appletv2. Tried it in Saturday recorded session
The problem Amber is probably having is this page is rendering the single-quote marks as special characters. When they are copied from here and pasted into the bookmark editor, they are esacped to be safe for URLs, which breaks the bookmarklet code. You can fix this by pasting the bookmarklet into notepad, changing the special quotes into normal single-quote marks, then copying and pasting that into the bookmark editor.
Alternatively, Jason, you might want to put the bookmarklet code in your blog post in a code or pre block, which would avoid the problem with special quotes getting copied.
I had the same problem as Amber above and noticed (even after trying the paste-in-notepad trick you suggested) that looking closely at the URL of the bookmarklet, the apostrophes had been replaced with three ‘%XX’ codes. I followed this process to fix the problem:
- Open your bookmarks
- Tap ‘Edit’
- Select the bookmark you created
- Tap the URL field (the one that starts with “javascript:”)
- Scroll in the field, if necessary, to the command “createElement”. It *should* read “createElement(‘script’);”, but in my case the single apostrophes were replaced by three sets of “%XX” codes. Remove those codes and replace them with single apostrophes.
- Scroll to the right and find the “e.src=’http://bendodson.com/bookmarklets/ios-airplay.js?’ ” section, replacing the codes in this segment with single apostrophes.
- Tap “Done” to save your bookmarks.
At this point, I returned to the Conference video page (I closed the page and reloaded it to refresh it) and followed the instructions in the post; this time, when I selected the bookmarklet, the video area *did* visibly refresh, and sure enough, moments later I was greeted with MoTab singing on my 43″ TV.
It’s worth mentioning that I have an iPhone 3GS and this trick works just fine. Thank you SO MUCH! Music and the Spoken Word is on now, and it looks and sounds great. I’m hoping the bandwidth doesn’t choke up at the top of the hour when the rest of the world logs on.
Amber, Benjamin was right… I have updated the code, although it looks the same, try to re-copy and paste the code into the bookmark and see if that works for you.
You were right with that, I had not noticed it. I have updated the code so that it should now let you copy and paste directly into the bookmark. Let me know if you have any other problems.
I have updated the bookmark code and I think I have it working so that no editing is necessary. Thanks for everyone who helped to point this out.
Hey Jason,
Worked perfect for me, thank you for posting this!
I also tried it on the iPad2 but to no avail. The iPhone worked perfect but once someone calls you it closes it out (obviously). It would be sweet to somehow get it working on the iPad that way it isn’t interrupted by calls.
Thanks again!!
VERY useful, thanks. Will be using it next conference. FYI, it also allows playing vudu.com videos on the appletv. You have to start the video on the ipad, hit the bookmarklet, and then start the movie again.