Scenario: I have many Plex devices throughout the house, and I’d like them all to play the same thing, synchronized. As I go from room to room, the same song is playing wherever I go. Or, if I’m watching something on the TV in the living room, the iPad in the kitchen is also playing the audio for it, so I don’t miss something when I go out to grab popcorn. In our house we have Roku3, iPhones with bluetooth speakers, a Windows 10 PC with decent speakers running the new app, a Macbook Air running the web UI, etc. Placing them in different rooms would give a great room-to-room DIY whole-house-audio experience.
Some ideas:
- In the UI (probably the server web UI, or maybe dynamically client-initiated), allow creation of “zones”, consisting of multiple devices. Zones can be overlapping, not necessarily exclusive; thus activating playback of some content in a zone might disrupt playback on some devices which are also playing another zone. That’s okay; most recent selection wins, so the device won’t be confused.
- Allow devices that have microphones (e.g. phones, laptops) to “listen” to special server-generated configuration tones coming from another device, so that playback delay can be calibrated. A device might not be eligible for zone membership until it’s been calibrated; or, check a box to override and say “I’m cool with some weird delay reverb” (good for folks with no microphone-enabled devices; or for rooms which aren’t close enough to have sound-bleed).
- Competes with Sonos (maybe?); so hopefully the recent Sonos announcements don’t prohibit the development of an awesome feature like this.
- Hope it’s not a dupe; I saw one thread from 2012 that seemed similar but not exactly, and I didn’t see any voting on it.
