open source av receiver projects?

[Beershaun]

Hi,
I was staring at my 10 year old Mac pro (tower of power/cheesegrater) and my ability to keep it relevant all these years by swapping out cards and upgrading ram and hard drives and wondered "Is there an equivalent project for AV pre processors? Maybe an open source OS for AV pre/pros that would allow me to build and upgrade my own pre/pro over time by buying and swapping in the appropriate AV cards, DACs, etc?"

I mean, this is now commonplace for audio/Video streaming with the Raspberry Pi and various OS builds like Volumio, Rasplex, and Moode.

I did a quick google search and found this project from 2017: https://hackaday.io/project/20469-modular-open-source-av-receiver

And lo and behold it was done with a raspberry pi.

It doesn't seem to be active anymore and I wondered if others have gone down this road or think there could be potential here.

Since there are enterprising folks building and selling amplifiers and media streaming boxes I thought this might have merit.

Anyone already travel down this road?

 

[somebodyelse]

If you want half-way recent codecs or HDMI standards in a diy hardware project the licensing and chipset availability will kill it unfortunately. The same developer has dropped the HDMI from the follow up project because as a DIYer you can't get the chips needed. The proprietary multichannel audio codecs will also be a stumbling block - they've not been reverse engineered yet AFAIK, and good luck licensing them for a DIY project. Then there's the small matter of the DMCA or its European equivalent. I'd love to see such a project, but I really can't see it happening. His followup has a lot in common with the FreeDSP project.

You could use a PC based A/V workstation - swapable video cards, audio interfaces etc. The pro-level software includes the required decoders, but it's certainly not cheap and I don't know if they'd selll license to an individual rather than a company. It's the sort of BS that makes me want to ignore multichannel entirely.

 

[Beershaun]

thanks for the response. Yeah thought it was something like that. It's too bad you can't buy the whole board and chipset like you can for a video card so it's all adhering to copyright laws through having the appropriate hardware legally purchased. just installed in your own motherboard and box running your own OS instead of an OEMs box.