A friend and I have started working as a visual jockey duo. We're new, but I've picked up that a lot of people in this trade are single-player mode only. We double the fun, but bring double the computers -- producing visuals in one and then using SRT (or sometimes NDI) to send video streams to the second computer, which produces its own visuals and sends that output to a projector via HDMI or DisplayPort.
Here's where it gets tricky. Up till our last show, we had done all of this at home with an unmanaged gigabit switch connected to the home router, with the two computers plugged into the switch. Sometimes we also would use the switch to connnect to a CDJ over ethernet.
Thing is, we didn't realize how IP addresses and stuff that I don't quite understand would come back to bite us until a show we went to do last week, where we didn't have a router to connect to (just a commercial, locked-down wifi network) and suddenly the two computers didn't really seem to see each other anymore, and neither one could detect the CDJ.
I got the CompTIA A+ cert about 5 years ago. A lot of that covered networking basics, but without a consistent need for that knowledge, it has definitely faded away. Now I'm realizing that I might need to start picking that up again. There's an innate satisfaction in the current tech setup we have -- since only one computer is the HDMI 'output', a gigabit switch and/or router gives us us almost unlimited options for 'inputs'. Right now it's a few programs running on a linux laptop, but in the future it could be multiple laptops, raspberry pi gadgets, NDI camera feeds, etc.
But it all starts with the networking. I have a third machine I want to bring into the mix, a DeskMini UM350 with with a Picasso Zen+ Ryzen 5 3450H. I meant to use it as a home media server but I think I might look at making it into some sort of router I need to learn the skillset anyway, it has dual gigabit ports (!!), and I've always dreamed of building a router since reading an article half a decade ago of someone who recycled an old gaming PC as a pfSense router for their home.
In my ideal setup, we would gain total control over our tech setup. It wouldn't matter as much if we needed a single ethernet input to the router, or if the individual machines were on wifi, or if we had no internet at all, because we'd still have one router to help all of the devices behave in a predictable, environment-agnostic way.
Plus, maybe the deskmini would have enough leftover resources to do something else for us, like be a NAS for shared visual assets, or run video processing, or host an instance of hydra.ojack.xyz. That's the fun thing about computers, they're just machines and you can make them do almost anything, as long as you can figure out how to ask.
Time to learn how to do that, I guess.
Here's where it gets tricky. Up till our last show, we had done all of this at home with an unmanaged gigabit switch connected to the home router, with the two computers plugged into the switch. Sometimes we also would use the switch to connnect to a CDJ over ethernet.
Thing is, we didn't realize how IP addresses and stuff that I don't quite understand would come back to bite us until a show we went to do last week, where we didn't have a router to connect to (just a commercial, locked-down wifi network) and suddenly the two computers didn't really seem to see each other anymore, and neither one could detect the CDJ.
I got the CompTIA A+ cert about 5 years ago. A lot of that covered networking basics, but without a consistent need for that knowledge, it has definitely faded away. Now I'm realizing that I might need to start picking that up again. There's an innate satisfaction in the current tech setup we have -- since only one computer is the HDMI 'output', a gigabit switch and/or router gives us us almost unlimited options for 'inputs'. Right now it's a few programs running on a linux laptop, but in the future it could be multiple laptops, raspberry pi gadgets, NDI camera feeds, etc.
But it all starts with the networking. I have a third machine I want to bring into the mix, a DeskMini UM350 with with a Picasso Zen+ Ryzen 5 3450H. I meant to use it as a home media server but I think I might look at making it into some sort of router I need to learn the skillset anyway, it has dual gigabit ports (!!), and I've always dreamed of building a router since reading an article half a decade ago of someone who recycled an old gaming PC as a pfSense router for their home.
In my ideal setup, we would gain total control over our tech setup. It wouldn't matter as much if we needed a single ethernet input to the router, or if the individual machines were on wifi, or if we had no internet at all, because we'd still have one router to help all of the devices behave in a predictable, environment-agnostic way.
Plus, maybe the deskmini would have enough leftover resources to do something else for us, like be a NAS for shared visual assets, or run video processing, or host an instance of hydra.ojack.xyz. That's the fun thing about computers, they're just machines and you can make them do almost anything, as long as you can figure out how to ask.
Time to learn how to do that, I guess.