Dissecting the Media Remote Protocol: Reverse Engineering an Apple TV

Mon, 19 Mar 2018 20:23:30 +0000

For me, the holy grail of home automation isn’t just being able to control lights with your smartphone. Connecting your lights to the internet opens up a ton of possibilities. Your smartphone is just one way to control them. The holy grail of home automation is removing the need to even control your devices at all.

When I watch a movie, I want my lights set a certain way. Seems simple enough. I watch everything on my Apple TV, so surely there should be a way to detect that and send the message along to HomeKit. In the past I’ve used a plugin for Plex that handled this quite well. The only downsides were that it was painstakingly tedious to program in the lighting settings, and it only worked in Plex. I figured the Apple TV must transmit its global play/pause state somehow, seeing as the Apple TV iOS app displays it.

Reverse Engineering on Evan Coleman

Dissecting the Media Remote Protocol: Reverse Engineering an Apple TV