Yamaha Musicast

[jim_lewis1]

Hi All,

Yamaha are making a lot of noise (geddit) about their new multiroom system called multicast. The long and short of it seems to be that enabled equipment, such as an AV receiver, will be able to send any source connected to the receiver to any other multicast enabled device.

This can be over the network or via bluetooth.

So far i've only seen marketing stuff about it, not any real hands on write-ups.

Obviously it will wrap up the music data in a proprietary wrapper (I should think), but I did think it might be quite useful if Jogglers were able to be used as targets. We already have these hooked up to amps/speakers so if Multicast was to use a DLNA variant/UPnP you could send any source to any joggler on your network.

Can anyone tell me whether it could be possible for this to work?

Only the latest Yamaha products offer multicast (which as someone who bought one last year is pretty annoying!)

Thanks

[Juggler]

This area is quite interesting. I've searched and haven't found much on open source solutions. I found a masters project from a US university that looked interesting, but development wasn't continued.

You might find this of interest :

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/279 ... -a-network

To touch on your question - I don't see why it couldn't work on the Joggler. The main issue is getting some software that will run on the Joggler and allow it to participate. What's the chances of the hacker community reverse engineering the custom stuff and producing something ?

Is the squeezeplay algorithm open source or reverse engineered ?

I'd be interested to know of any other developments that simulcast audio amongst several networked devices.

[jim_lewis1]

Exactly, the music data is presumably obfuscated in some way, but perhaps is un-obfuscatable (think I just created that word!).

I did contact Yamaha to complain that my essentially current device can't offer this feature, even (if I understand correctly) as a target for other multicast enabled devices.

He did hint that soon to be announced products would address this, but it's irritating as surely it's simply a software requirement for network enabled devices to be upgraded.

I think Yamaha are hoping that people will choose to enable their existing equipment to participate by purchasing this enabling device from them.