>possibly with a few mods to the display output?
The player works in UDP packets, nothing needs modding!

>don't suppose there's much that's "special" about using a Raspberry Pi as the "Master", or is there?

Nothing special at all, you can use anything you like as a master:-) The empeg cant be an effective master simply because its fractionally too slow, works well as a slave though.

The player on platforms other than the empeg has no display of its own, it uses UDP to send display data and accept button push data from either a process on the same machine or stations on the LAN.

The script ./compile will build the player binary for/on most linux hosts. I've yet to try a Sparc (I do have one, I must dust it off, we use an Ultra 10 as a coffee table !) or MIPS but I have tried numerous PCs plus the Pi board and another generic Arm linux board :-)

Two display programs for Centro player are in the sources, "display_on_x11" is a scalable X11 128x32 display, display_on_framebuffer is similar but for raw framebuffer, both require 16 bit per pixel displays at the moment.

The master is a UDP broadcast source, it sends audio data (called audio plus in the sources) and display data as UDP streams, any number of slaves on the LAN can decode it. I pretty much guarantee it will only work on networks with real cables !

Master/Slave is network transparent, if both players are on the same LAN and in the same subnet you simple select mode->master on one and mode->slave on the other (or push the rotary encoder button to toggle between normal and slave mode on a player).

I must write some kind of manual or docs for this when I have time :-)

Almost forgot, "buttons_x11" gives a virtual set of buttons, both the display and buttons code will drive Centro player,or the original empeg player software if you use this code on the empeg:

http://www.jonshouse.co.uk/download/broadcastfb_proc.tar.gz
(binary in is in the tar, code for original player only Centro includes the functionality)

This is what it looks like from the linux desktop:
http://www.jonshouse.co.uk/display_on_x11.jpg
(will make a windows version one day maybe)

To use the entire player on a linux desktop PC just

cd player
./compile

run ./bin_x86/display_on_x11
and ./bin_x86/buttons_x11 127.0.0.1
and ./bin_x86/player_pulse (or works less well on desktops, player_alsa)


No empeg required to play, that is how I did most the coding, I compile for Pi board and empeg after the changes are tested on the PC.

Jon

PS If anyone is confused dont worry, I'm confused and I wrote it ........