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A comment on HomePod has been jailbroken with checkra1n. Parent comment

Re:HomePod has been jailbroken with checkra1n by lukifer on Friday November 20, 2020 @02:09PM (#25163762)
It's a convoluted setup I'm not sure I'd recommend to anyone else! :) Still tinkering on it, but current rig is a Respeaker Core [0] running voice2json [1], which sends MQTT commands to a Mac Mini running mopidy [2], and the audio is routed through Airfoil [3] to multiple AirPlay speakers. (In theory, a Pi could drive all that directly, using shairport [4] rather than Airfoil.)

The major shortcoming is that Airfoil doesn't support Airplay 2, so it doesn't take full advantage of HomePod stereo pairing; and while the sync is perfect, it comes at the cost of massive lag (5+ seconds). Sounds great though!

[0] https://respeaker.io/rk3229_core/

[1] https://voice2json.org/

[2] https://mopidy.com/

[3] https://rogueamoeba.com/airfoil/

[4] https://github.com/mikebrady/shairport-sync

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Re:HomePod has been jailbroken with checkra1n by whoisburbansky on Friday November 20, 2020 @03:06PM (#25164372)
That sounds incredible, thanks for posting. Do you not use the sync at all with that kind of lag?
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Re:HomePod has been jailbroken with checkra1n by lukifer on Friday November 20, 2020 @07:12PM (#25166709)
The speakers sync perfectly with each other for pure audio, but the setup is definitely unusable for video or games due to the sync delay. It seems to work okay switching back and forth between AirPlay 1 and 2, so I can temporarily take over from Airfoil and use them as an AP2 stereo pair, in which case they sync well for video.

Supposedly Airplay 2 was cracked about a year ago, but there still aren't any usable third-party implementations. Really a shame that Apple hasn't opened up the standard.

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