Yes!!!? Great idea Thorsten!

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I?m with Noah,

decoupling the ?Crestron-OS“ from the hardware adds options instead of limiting (at least as long as Crestron continues to deliver hardware processor as well).

Many modern automation systems were developed as a software right from the beginning.

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However, i?ve got an IT-background, so that makes things easier I guess.

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And I also agree that there are issues (mentioned by Noah and others) that need to be addressed, but i?m confident they will.

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Anyone on my side with a petition for free developer VC4-licenses? ?

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Cheers,

Thorsten

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What I’m reading here seems to be mostly fear of change.? Having worked on the client side for over a decade, and in high-dollar residential for two, I can tell you VC-4 is a product our clients have been wanting for a long time.?

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It’s a solution that can be deployed globally as a hardware box, or VM in the cloud, that is managed like other IT resources.? This architecture gives them visibility and control over AV equipment on their network instead of it being a collection of mystery boxes on their network (if they even allow it).? Deployed on a segmented AV VLAN or sub-network it’s a powerful leap forward from the Flintstone black-box solution the AV industry seems so attached to.

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With this said, Crestron has a major conundrum with the licensing.? Upon initial release there was no “phone home” requirement.? What they found is integrators were essentially pirating VC-4 and they took measures to protect their intellectual property.? Leave it to the few bad to screw things up for the good.?

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Key issues needing a resolution.

1. HA (High-Availability) – Currently it’s a manual process to reboot or spin up another instance if the server goes down.? If the whole house or multiple offices are running on a server then it needs the ability to be deployed as a super clustered pair of servers with auto failover.
2. Evolved Software Theft Protection – I think they can take a page from the non-linear audio/video editing industry here (without the torrent issues).? There is also no reason a client cannot set this up in a DMZ with limited access to the licensing server.? LAN/WAN teams do this on a regular basis with a multitude of products.
3. Linux – Would really like to see them develop a version that runs on Red Hat, but that would mean the licensing would have to go up in price.

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Best,

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Noah

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To the many points made, this is why I actually prefer a used 3-series/purpose-built appliance to the concept of VC4/3rd-Party 'commodity' hardware (then update to 4-series when available)
Frankly for most residential systems, 3-series is fine IMO.

At the very least, there will be a pretty long learning curve for VC4 as we find all the things that are 'different' with it vs a dedicated processor.

It may be the way to go long-term, but I'm always warry of the modern attitude of 'new is cool and thus better' (Largely driven by Marketing departments).
My experience is that most new stuff is not thought through very well compared to past times (showing my age here!) and this is one of the reasons that things seem to have a shelf life in 'minutes' not years...

From my perspective, the cost of developing for the 'catch of the day' is higher than can be rightly amortized.
And at the end of the day, the things we're doing are pretty much the same things we did 20 years ago - there just seems to be a desire to do old things in a new way so that it seems more exciting, but not really different...