Faking out Google Now TV cards

[bearda]

I was reading up on the Google Now TV cards, and the "Smart TV" requirement sounds like bull. From what I can tell Google Now just looks for a tv on your network to know when to pop up the card asking if you are watching TV. All the information it gets on what you're watching comes from an audio stream. I've got a dumb TV that works fine, and with my Tivo/Chromecast/AppleTV setup I really don't see any need to get all that stuff in the TV itself. Still, if all Google Now does is look for service beacons on the network and it doesn't get any actual data from the TV directly, why couldn't I fake it out?

My thought was running an SSDP service responder on my Ubuntu fileserver that pretended to be one of the compatible smart TVs. Hopefully that gets me to the point where the card pops up when I connect to my home network. SSDP looks a little different from the Zeroconf setup I'm used to using with Avahi, but miniSSDP looks like it may be able to do what I'm looking for. I'm still foggy on exactly what one of these "Smart TVs" looks like on the network, though. Anyone know what kind of services they advertise, or even the model of a TV that works with Google Now TV cards that I can try to get more info on? If there are any relatively technical users who have one of these on their network and wouldn't mind getting a PCAP for me that would make this a cinch.