Just got my first Apple TV. Jailbroken. Possible to use iPad/phone as airspeakers?

Hello all. I'm new here, but not to the jailbreak and iOS community. I've been a long time iOS user and follow the scene pretty closely.

With that said, I've had my eye on an Apple TV for a long time now and finally decided to buy one last night. I love it so far. It complements my iPhone and iPad nicely. When I got home with it, the first thing I did was jailbreak it. I haven't had too much time to play around with all the features and such, but I have an issue with it that I hope a solution exists for.

You see, I work a completely different schedule than my roomates. When I'm up, they're usually sleeping and vice versa. For this reason, I wear headphones 99% of the time to avoid waking them up. I was a little disappointed that the only audio-out that the AppleTV supports is optical-out. I was really hoping for a 3.5 audio jack for my wireless cans.

After doing a little research, it appears that AirPlay [in theory] can handle this task by sending the audio signal to my iphone or ipad, and then just use my headphones on that device to listen to the audio, while still watching video on my TV via the Apple TV.

I saw this guide on how to set it up, but it's quite old at this point. All of my devices are using the latest iOS software (5.01) so I'm not sure if it even works anymore. I also saw an nice application on the appstore called Air Speaker, but it doesn't seem to support video. Only audio from the ipod app.

Can anyone point me in the right direction to get this setup? Is it even possible? I really don't want to buy a reciever JUST so I can use a set of headphones. I'm new to the Apple TV and don't know the in's and out's of it yet so any information is greatly appreciated.

thanks in advance.

waw74 said:

does your TV have a headphone jack?

the aTV2 will not send audio via airplay (the one would) unless there's a jailbreak app i don't know about.

the airspeaker app you mention would work with video, but only when playing your video on an iPhone or iPad (no iTunes), so you could watch something on your pad, and have the sound come out of your phone, but that doesn't sound like it would be very helpful.
you can only send audio from music in iTunes

you could use your existing headphones with something like this, but the signal would be a line level, so you might need a small headphone amp to boost the signal and control the volume (since the aTV unfortunately has no onboard volume control).
although your headphones already have an amp, so they might accept line level normally.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately my TV only has a SPDIF/Toslink output.

I went ahead, bit the bullet and just ordered a DAC online. I didn't really want to spend the money on one, but this way, I shouldn't run into an issue again since I'll but using it via my TV's output.

I really hope that apple includes iphones/ipads as remote speaker devices in future updates. It seems like a no-brainer than some people might like it use 'em like that.