AppleTvControlLibrary 2.2.0

AppleTvControlLibrary

.NET client libraries for Apple TV remote-control protocols: Companion Link (HID input, media transport, volume, power state - used by tvOS remotes and the Apple TV Remote app) and MRP (Media Remote Protocol, tunneled over AirPlay 2 - now-playing metadata, playback control, and player/queue state). Both target net472 and net10.0 from a single, non-conditional codebase.

This repository does not implement RAOP or DMAP/DACP, and does not implement AirPlay 2 media streaming itself - only the MRP control channel tunneled over an AirPlay 2 connection.

Trademark notice and disclaimer: Apple, Apple TV, tvOS, AirPlay, and Siri are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. This project is an independent, unofficial implementation of a reverse-engineered protocol and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or approved by Apple Inc. in any way. "Apple TV" and other Apple product names are used solely to describe compatibility and interoperability. No Apple software, assets, or confidential documentation are included in or derived for this repository.

Documentation

API documentation is published at oznetmaster.github.io/AppleTVControlLibrary, covering the Companion Link, MRP, and Discovery libraries.

Packages

AppleTvControlLibrary, AppleTvControlLibrary.Mrp, and AppleTvControlLibrary.Discovery are intentionally independent, independently versioned packages: a host with a known Apple TV address can use either protocol library without multicast discovery, and a host can use the discovery library (which covers Companion Link, AirPlay, and MRP discovery behind their own interfaces - see MRP Discovery) independently of either protocol. Install AppleTvControlLibrary.All when all three are wanted; it restores all three library packages automatically.

Repository layout

Companion Link

The Companion Link protocol is the channel tvOS remotes and the Apple TV Remote app use for HID input (remote buttons, touch), media transport control, volume, and power state. The AppleTvControlLibrary package is a from-scratch, byte-exact C# port of pyatv's Companion Link implementation; see Companion Link protocol reference and correctness below.

WPF reference host

src/AppleTv.Remote.Wpf is a working desktop reference host rather than a reusable UI component. It demonstrates the full application workflow: scan for devices, pair once, persist credentials, reconnect, and control a selected Apple TV. Its UI includes directional and media controls, capability-aware volume and mute controls, power-state updates, app launching, switchable-account selection, and reactive text entry when the Apple TV keyboard gains focus. It also demonstrates handling CompanionApi.ConnectionClosed: on an unexpected fault (not a user-initiated disconnect) it retries the connection with a bounded, increasing backoff, giving up after a few attempts if the device stays unreachable.

<img src="https://oznetmaster.github.io/AppleTVControlLibrary/images/companion-link-remote.png" alt="Companion Link Remote WPF reference host" width="180" />

Use it as an integration example for credential storage, connection lifecycle handling, and the high-level CompanionApi; hosts are expected to provide their own UI and secure credential-store implementation.

What it can do

• Discover Apple TVs advertising Companion Link over mDNS (_companion-link._tcp), query a known device address directly, or stop a multicast lookup once an exact service name resolves.
• Pair with a device (HAP pair-setup over SRP) and persist the resulting credentials.
• Establish an encrypted session (HAP pair-verify, ChaCha20-Poly1305) and bring up a Companion Link session (_systemInfo, _touchStart, _sessionStart, TVRCSessionStart, _tiStart).
• Notify callers when the connection is closed or lost (CompanionApi.ConnectionClosed), whether cleanly or due to an unexpected fault, via ConnectionClosedEventArgs.Exception. The library itself does not reconnect automatically; consumers wanting to reconnect (as the WPF reference host does) must do so themselves in response to this event.
• Send HID commands (directional pad, menu/home, volume, play/pause, Siri, etc.) and touch/swipe events.
• Send media-control commands (play/pause/skip, absolute volume) gated by the device's advertised capabilities.
• Track power state (asleep/awake/screensaver/idle) via pushed SystemStatus/TVSystemStatus events, and toggle power via sleep/wake HID commands.
• List launchable apps (AppList()) and launch an app by bundle identifier or deep-link URL (LaunchApp(...)). Treat an empty or missing app list as a normal outcome, not an error - some tvOS builds do not populate it, and callers should not hard-depend on the list being non-empty.
• List switchable user accounts (AccountList()) and switch the active account (SwitchAccount(...)). Same graceful-degradation rule as app listing: an empty or missing account list is a normal outcome, not an error. There is no way to query which account is currently active - FetchUserAccountsEvent returns only the switchable list, and nothing in _systemInfo or the _iMC event fills the gap. Callers can only know the current account after they themselves issue a successful SwitchAccount(...); a switch made on the device itself (Control Center, the user icon, another client) is invisible to this library, with no event pushed for it.

What it does not do

• No now-playing metadata (title, artist, artwork, position) - that is MRP territory; see the MRP section below.
• No absolute channel selection (only channel increment/decrement).
• No mute command exists on the wire; callers build it from SetVolume(0.0) plus a stashed previous level, gated on the device advertising volume control at all.

Getting started

using AppleTvControlLibrary.Discovery.Companion;
using AppleTvControlLibrary.Protocol;

// 1. Discover devices.
var discovery = new MulticastCompanionDiscovery ();
var results = await discovery.ScanAsync (TimeSpan.FromSeconds (5));

// If an Apple TV IPv4 address is already known, resolve its advertised Companion TCP endpoint.
var directDiscovery = new UnicastCompanionDiscovery (IPAddress.Parse ("192.0.2.10"));
var directResult = await directDiscovery.ScanAsync (TimeSpan.FromSeconds (5));

// Or stop the multicast lookup when this exact mDNS service instance name resolves.
var namedResult = await MulticastCompanionDiscovery.DiscoveryAsync (
	 "Living Room", TimeSpan.FromSeconds (5));

// 2. Pair (once per device) using AppleTvDeviceManager-style orchestration in your host app,
//    or drive SrpAuthHandler / CompanionProtocol directly for full control.

// 3. After pairing, connect and issue commands via CompanionApi.
await api.ConnectAsync ();
await api.SendHidCommandAsync (down: true, command: HidCommand.Select);
await api.SendHidCommandAsync (down: false, command: HidCommand.Select);

Async APIs

Version 1.1.0 is async-first. connection, commands, event subscriptions, and discovery. The original synchronous APIs remain available for source compatibility but are obsolete; migrate to their Async equivalents to avoid blocking application threads.

The WPF reference host also recovers one stale auto-connect endpoint at startup: it discovers the stored device name, requires its rpmrtid identifier to match the paired device, updates the saved address and port, and retries once. It never accepts a same-named device with a different identifier.

See src/AppleTv.Remote.Wpf in the source repository for a complete reference host application (scan, pair, connect, and drive a remote-control UI).

Companion Link hardware compatibility### Companion Link hardware compatibility

This library has been tested against Apple TV 4K models only. Older, pre-4K devices (e.g. Apple TV HD / A1625, and earlier generations) are not part of the test matrix and have not been validated against real hardware. Companion Link should work the same way on those devices, and nothing in the protocol implementation deliberately excludes them, but "should work" is not a guarantee - treat pre-4K support as unverified until confirmed against real hardware, and please report any issues you hit on that hardware.

Companion Link protocol reference and correctness

This library is a from-scratch, byte-exact C# port of the Companion Link protocol as implemented by pyatv 0.18.0. Every protocol constant in the source carries a comment citing the pyatv symbol it was ported from (see ATTRIBUTIONS.md), so that a future re-vendor of pyatv can be reconciled with a diff rather than a re-derivation of the whole protocol. See THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.txt for full license text of the projects consulted during the port.

MRP

MRP (Media Remote Protocol) is the protocol tvOS uses for now-playing metadata and playback control. Apple TV no longer exposes MRP directly over a raw TCP socket; the AppleTvControlLibrary.Mrp package speaks MRP tunneled over an AirPlay 2 connection (AirPlayMrpConnection / Ap2Session), matching pyatv's current transport. Pairing and channel encryption reuse the same HAP (HomeKit Accessory Protocol) pair-setup/pair-verify and ChaCha20-Poly1305 primitives as Companion Link, via the shared AppleTv.Hap library - src/AppleTv.Mrp depends on it directly rather than re-implementing crypto.

What it can do

• Pair with a device over AirPlay 2 (HAP pair-setup over SRP) and establish an encrypted MRP session (HAP pair-verify, ChaCha20-Poly1305).
• Track now-playing state: active player/client, title, artist, album, duration, elapsed time, playback rate, shuffle/repeat state, and supported commands, all pushed by the device and exposed through MrpPlayerStateManager.
• Fetch artwork for the current now-playing item, preferring the device's own remote-artwork URL (HTTP fetch with an in-memory cache) and falling back to an in-band PLAYBACK_QUEUE_REQUEST_MESSAGE fetch when no remote URL is available, mirroring pyatv's _fetch_remote_artwork / _fetch_local_artwork behavior.
• Send playback commands (play, pause, next/previous track, skip, seek) and volume commands through MrpRemoteControl, gated by the currently active player's supported-command set.
• Track device power state (MrpPowerState: Unknown/Off/On) derived from device-info messages, raising PowerStateChanged only when the state actually changes.
• Subscribe to push updates through MrpPushUpdater, which forwards player-state changes to a registered IMrpPushUpdaterListener and routes listener exceptions to the listener's error callback instead of letting them escape as unhandled exceptions - starting a push updater without a listener registered throws MrpNoAsyncListenerException rather than failing silently.

What it does not do

• No HID button/touch input, discovery-mode switching, or account switching - that is Companion Link territory; see Companion Link above.
• No AirPlay 2 media/audio/video streaming - only the MRP control channel tunneled over the AirPlay 2 connection is implemented.
• No raw-TCP MRP transport. An earlier direct-TCP MrpConnection/TcpMrpTransport implementation has been retired in favor of the AirPlay 2-tunneled transport and is kept only for reference under archive/mrp-tcp-transport.

MRP WPF reference host

src/AppleTv.Remote.Mrp.Wpf is a working desktop reference host for MRP, structured the same way as the Companion Link WPF host: pair once, persist credentials, connect, and drive a now-playing UI. Its MainViewModel renders title/artist/album, artwork (with app-icon fallback when no artwork is available), and transport controls that enable/disable based on the currently advertised supported-command set. MrpDeviceManager wires MrpProtocol, MrpPlayerStateManager, and MrpRemoteControl together for the view model to consume.

Use it as an integration example for MRP pairing, credential storage, and now-playing UI binding; hosts are expected to provide their own UI and secure credential-store implementation.

Discovery

MRP-over-AirPlay devices advertise the _mediaremotetv._tcp mDNS service type. Discovery lives in the shared AppleTvControlLibrary.Discovery package alongside the Companion Link and AirPlay discovery implementations, isolated behind IMrpDiscovery (MulticastMrpDiscovery) so it can be swapped per host, the same as ICompanionDiscovery and IAirPlayDiscovery. There is no separate AppleTvControlLibrary.Mrp.Discovery package - hosts that need MRP discovery should reference AppleTvControlLibrary.Discovery directly. tools/AppleTV.Mrp.ScanTool demonstrates it end to end.

MRP protocol reference and correctness

Like the Companion Link library, AppleTvControlLibrary.Mrp is a from-scratch C# port of pyatv's MRP implementation (pyatv/protocols/mrp), including its protobuf message definitions (vendored under src/AppleTv.Mrp/Protobuf/pyatv/protocols/mrp/protobuf) and constants such as RepeatState, ShuffleState, and InputAction, each carrying a citation comment to the pyatv source file and line it was ported from. See ATTRIBUTIONS.md and THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.txt for licensing details.

Tools and tests

Each protocol has a matching set of command-line tools and test projects:

The scan tools discover devices over mDNS and print their advertised service metadata; the remote tools pair with a device once (persisting credentials locally) and then send interactive commands from the console, serving as minimal, UI-free integration examples for each library.

Both protocol test suites are MSTest-based, multi-targeted (net472 and net10.0), and run primarily against an in-process fake Apple TV rather than real hardware, so the suites are deterministic and safe to run in CI. tests/AppleTV.Companion.LiveTests is the only opt-in exception: it exercises a real Apple TV and is excluded from the standard CI run. tests/AppleTv.Hap.Tests covers the pairing/crypto library shared by both protocols independently of either transport.

Supported platforms

• .NET Framework 4.7.2 (desktop, including Mono hosts - validate independently; see notes below)
• .NET 10

net472 support relies on Span<T>/Memory<T> polyfills and compiler-attribute shims so the same C# 13 codebase compiles on both targets with no #if branching in the protocol layer. If a net472 build is destined for a Mono runtime rather than desktop .NET Framework, validate Span<T>/ValueTask behavior and socket options on that runtime specifically - a green build on Windows net472 does not guarantee equivalent behavior on Mono.

License

MIT - see LICENSE. Third-party attributions are listed in ATTRIBUTIONS.md and THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.txt.

Trademarks

Apple, Apple TV, tvOS, AirPlay, and Siri are trademarks of Apple Inc. This project is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Apple Inc. All product names, logos, and brands referenced are property of their respective owners and are used here for identification purposes only.

Changelog

See CHANGELOG.md.