[Swansea Hackspace] New Member and project Question

[Justin Mitchell]

Sorry this got delayed, the large attachment triggered the spam filters
and i only just noticed it.

On Thu, 2015-01-01 at 15:53 +0000, Debi Withers wrote:

> I want to make a 'transmission machine' which can simultaneously play
> back up to 8 channels of digitised media - video, images and audio. 

> Attached to the 8 outputs will be four screens and 1-4 speakers -
> although all the audio channels will probably be played through one
> speaker - so comparable to a live mix which plays back multiple audio
> channels. 

> I've asked a friend of mine who seems to think this would be possible
> through Arduino, but I wanted to check in with a local hackspace for
> advice to flesh out the idea.  

Definitely not the kind of thing an Arduino could handle, at a stretch
you might get one to decode a single audio stream, but no way they could
handle video decoding.

You would need something at least as powerful as a Raspberry Pi to do
video decodes, and even then you would need one per stream.

Mostly i think it would be a software problem, writing a control
interface and remotely controlling playback on each device, steaming the
media over ethernet from some sort of master computer or NAS.

The audio mixing might be better done in analogue, with a traditional
mixer, after the RPi's have decoded it along with the video streams.

There are others in the group with better experience with playback and
mixing than me, ive done mostly video/audio encoding work

> I see there is a workshop on 8 Jan but sadly I cannot make this
> date...
It would be better to turn up on a Monday when we have our Open Social
Nights, there will be more and wider range of people available to talk
about ideas than there would be during a specific workshop.