Digital Home Server application

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soitjes
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Joined: Wed Feb 10, 2010 10:35 pm

Re: Digital Home Server application

Post by soitjes »

I’m very proud to announce the availability of release 2.1.3.0 of my Digital Home Server. New is the multi-room audio feature, allowing to manage audio streams to multiple rooms.

Sending audio to multiple rooms has a few specific challenges. Imagine that you walk through your house, and every time you leave/enter a room you hear different music. Or you could have a PC in every room, listening to the same Internet Radio station. You would have a little delay between the different audio streams, which is very annoying.

In DHS if you choose to hear the same music in multiple rooms the audio stream will be cloned, so that you hear exactly the same audio in all rooms.

DHS uses the approach of one sound card per room, as illustrated below

Image

Those audio cards are very cheap, and you can find plenty on eBay or DealExtreme. Every audio card is then connected to speakers in every room. Of course, this assumes you have audio cables to all the rooms in your house !

Once you have those sound cards you can create as many audio streams as you like, and send them to one or more rooms.

Image

In the above example you have two audio streams, where the second one is being sent to the Living Room and Kitchen.

At this moment, only the MP3 and Internet Radio modules are adapted for multi-room audio. The other modules will simply use the default sound card.

A more detailed guide is available on my site : http://www.digitalhomeserver.net/using- ... io-in-dhs/

Next module will be “Where Is Wally”, another request from my wife. But you will have to wait for the release to find out what it is…

Soitjes.
My Digital Home Server - http://www.digitalhomeserver.net
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