DAAP over internet? why do I need a ssh tunnel?

[Anonymous]

Hi i want to develop a special media player with a DAAP client and i was wondering why acces to a daap share inst more simply than with a SSH tunnel. Does it could runs if i learn the IP adress to my DAAP client and i have route the rights ports on my router ???
if not, why not? Is it an easy way to ‘hack’ Firefly to make it possible?
thx.

[EVILRipper]

Yes, you can access daap as easy as typing an url in your browser.
However, most clients only support DAAP only by ‘discovery’.
Discovery usually happens through broadcast on the local network.
However, when remote, the broadcast won’t work. You’ll have to ‘force’ the discovery. Using a SSH tunnel ‘forces’ discovery of firefly(DAAP) on your system.

If the firefly address is given, you can directly call it from the client. Even if it’s remote. I used a similar way when developing DaapPlaylistGenerator.
It connects to a given address (whether it’s remote or local, doesn’t matter) and processes all daap requests/responses.

[Anonymous]

ok thank you for your quick answer!!!
So i should be able to acces to my firefly server through the internet, if i develop a client with adapted features 🙂
I’m developing a solution who will work mostly exclusively with a daap
server as a library server. So i’m very interested on the development of firefly and other DAAP libraries.

3 things i reproach to Firefly (for my usage) is that i cannot modify the ID3 tags from a client. That is normal for security reasons, but it could be useful. The other thing is the protocol witch it gives the database content.
If i use Firefly through internet, the retriving of the database would be quite long.
That’s cuz Firefly uses the daap protocol, but i think that if entries of database were sent on an other way, the download time of the database would be faster….

A structure like:

An other thing i reproach to Firefly (but an other time its cause of the daap protocol) is that there is no way to retrive the album art before the song is played. Maybe on internet that could be too big to retrive, but on a local network, i think its technically possible, if the album arts are intelligently extracted, compressed and sent to the client when it asks for it.

I think it will be a time where all these features will have to be developed. Maybe if they are not implemented in a fiew month i will develop it by myself, based on the firefy media server. 🙂 so i think i ll write back soon in this forum.[/code]

[Anonymous]

If you want to develop a DAAP client, I’d suggest you avoid “reproaching” mt-daapd for not implementing things that aren’t actually part of the DAAP protocol, like modifying the data structures. As much as we love mt-daap on this forum, I think everyone understands that there *are* other DAAP servers out there, and it would be strange to implement features not part of the DAAP spec that Apple implements.

And your second request — to change the whole data structure to spit out the XML file you’ve written — would have the effect of turning your DAAP client into… well, something that doesn’t even support the DAAP protocol.

To me, it sounds like the DAAP protocol isn’t something for you. Maybe write a custom job that has support for modifying the database remotely, and uses a slimmed-down XML stream?

Also, check out the Add-On Software forum — there’s a few web-based (using Flash and Java) clients already in the works.

[Anonymous]

Hello!
Ok you re right, i dont reproach specially the firefly server, but the Apple DAAP protocol. I wannot REPLACE this protocol, cuz it is still understood by iTunes, but maybe develop and adding an alternative protocol, and using the firefly features for scanning files and creating a database…
I agree that DAAP is a very spread protocol, so we have to keep working with it but it seems thats not Apple’s wish.
I think open source community is able to develop a more efficient protocol, and we’re not forced to follow the iTunes way of thinking.

So yeah ^^ i ll check out the addon software forum:)

huuuh, see u!

(sorry for my bad english)

[Author]

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