I have been reading about some of the more advanced features of VLC and it looks like with a bit of work it contains everything needed for a 'grow your own' sonos system. I have a technical (but not coding) background, so its an ambitious project for me to start but who knows. I wonder maybe if someone has already done this? Below is my basic plan of attack in terms of what I wish to achieve and how I wish to achieve. I would most appreciate any advice from people on what they think of the Plan.
Requirement
So first of I wanted to define what I am looking for the system to provide me with. The main requirement, is the ability to play either different or the same music in multiple rooms, basically for each room to able to play its own music, or for each room to being playing the same single piece of music. I am just after music for now. Video may come later.
How to achieve this?
So the intention for now is to use a myriad of old laptops and desktops I have lying around at home and work (I would imagine most people here know what I mean by that
!). All they need is a sound out, an OS (windows for now) and a LAN or WiFi connection, I have 5 machines that fit the bill, that happens to be the number of zones I want to have. For now though I will be concentrating on getting it to work with 3 machines (A 'server' and 2 'zones').I intend to make use of two separate features of VLC. Streaming and Remote Control. I want this all to be controllable from anywhere in the house on almost any internet enabled device, so the final interface will be a web based interface.
The 'server' will be a fairly powerful PC, stored in the living room. It will have access to a NAS where all the music will be stored.
I plan to use the VLM feature to broadcast multiple music streams from this PC, each broadcast will be a multicast HTTP Stream. When you open the web interface, it will have two sections, INPUT and OUTPUT, it will default to having two streams created (Called Steam1 and Stream2), but there will be option to create more streams when needed in the INPUT section. The OUTPUT sections will have the list of configured Zones (these will be configurable in a config file).
The plan is for each Stream to have its own broadcast channel (either same IP and different Ports, or different IP's). Each Stream will have a File/Folder Selector, Pause, Play, Skip and Master Volume controls as well as an On/Off button. These will be controlling steams on the 'Server' so locally effectively. This can be done easily enough at present through the Web VLM interface, which I believe operates on LUA. So LUA scripting should be able to cope with this.
Each OUTPUT (Zone), will be predefined, it will have an IP and Port which will correspond to a VLC instance on each Machine. So Zone 1 might be a laptop in the kitchen (192.168.0.15 maybe with a port of 8080). The web interface must be able to control the volume of this VLC instance, and also tell it which Stream to Listen to. Each Output will have a box, it will have a volume slider, and a drop down box (which will show the Streams set up). That is all, so the only controls that will need to be sent to the machine is Volume Up/Down, and to change the stream source, if you dont want the Zone playing any music, maybe you could have an off button which would null the Network stream details and mute it. These remote commands I believe can sent either using the HTTP interface on each machine, or via the command line interface.
Each OUTPUT (Zone), would need a static IP and Port, adding more OUTPUTS would be a little difficult, but I am sure It could be achieved.
The difficult part will be making this into an easy to user single interface, as I said I have little to no coding experience so this will be the hard part. Any thoughts or suggestions people. I dont even really know where to start. I could start by building/designing the web interface maybe, then work on getting to interface with VLC after?
Thanks
Anton