There’s already a few hacks out there to allow you to extend the admittedly rather limited AirPlay functionality of iOS 4.2 to run on non-iOS devices: last week, for example, TUAW’s Erica Sadun released AirPlayer, an app that tricks AirPlayer into think your Mac’s an AppleTV.
Now, though, plucky and ingenious hackers are figuring out how to do the same thing on non-Apple hardware, and the first fruit of those labors has now been released for Linux.
The hack runs on Ubuntu within XBMC, previously known as Xbox Media Center, the HTPC media front end that started on Microsoft’s original Xbox console and has since become its own cross-platform entity, having also forked the incredible Boxee application (and physical set-top box).
Pretty neat, though I wonder how Apple feels about all of this. Something tells me Cupertino wants AppleTV to be limited to Apple devices only. Now it runs on Linux, and it looks like Windows is in the crosshairs next.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
