Hi,
what would be the best approach to output multichannel sound along video on Windows?
I can pack the four channels that I need directly into the video container… would it play from Splash? Is there any possibility to route audio channels?
Or I can have the audio channels separately and try to synchronize video output from Splash and audio output from other application with timecode (played from a third application?). Do you have any tested workflows for this?
Thank you!
Hi again,
Splash is capable of reading multichannel audio, I used it in the past with as many as 8 channels if I remember correctly. They were all embedded in the video file, encoded as Hap, in a .avi container.
I was using Linux at the time, and there are many tools to route the audio outputs correctly. It is even better nowadays with Pipewire. I don’t have much experience with Windows in this regard but it should be possible too, as the library I use for audio (Portaudio) supports multichannel audio on all major platforms.
Another approach, which is usually implemented in venues with lots of audio channels (like fulldomes, or any system with spatialized audio), is to use another software to play audio, and output an additional audio source with a SMPTE timecode. Splash is able to decode the timecode and use it to control the video playback.
With this approach the audio is usually played on another computer, but it works when everything is on the same computer. You just need to send the timecode signal to Splash. Again, I have no experience regarding how to do this in Windows but it should be doable.
You can look at this page of the documentation for a bit more information: SMPTE master clock.
If you manage to get it to work on Windows, I would be grateful if you could share your workflow 
Great, thanks for all the pointers, I will be trying this next week and I let you know if I come to any results.