DDR

The Synchromesh DDR is a turn-key upgrade from an HD VTR or DDR. It runs a show hardened Linux system, boots fast and plays Quicktime movies using a wide range of codecs, or records to a removable SATA hard disk
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Turbine

Synchromesh Turbine is our 'mini' solution. It's a small, rugged package, but plays out mildly compressed video with the quality and flexibility of it's older brother, the Synchromesh DDR. Turbine works on MeshNet, can play in sync with other units, and receives all it's commands from other units or MeshShift, or external control (TCP/IP).

Turbine offers the power of Synchromesh playback, with less footprint in your machine room - and wallet! Team it with DDRs or Octane to get the most power.

Octane

Synchromesh Octane turns an ordinary computer - or an extraordinary one, you choose - into am HD capable recording station. Record video, transcode and compress on the fly, and if you have a Mesh, automatically share the files with all units at startling speed. Currently supports Macs with OS X Leopard.

Octane also works as a single channel player to review content, or play to a single destination.

Spark

Synchromesh Spark is a software application to run fullscreen video on a single computer with transitions and simple but powerful clip lists - replacing DVD, VTR or DDR playback
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Utilities

MeshShift

MeshShift is an easy to use application you can install on a computer of your choice to control Synchromesh channels (excepting Spark). MeshShift mimics the appearance of the Synchromesh DDR front panel, so there's nothing else to learn, and it can access the full power of the system: controlling any channel, changing settings, importing and exporting media

Utilities

Every Synchromesh DDR includes a Utility app that can quickly boot into a simple environment to offer basic system repair and configuration utilties, such as RAID drive formatting, or system upgrades

System (Gerry)

Why Linux?

There are lots of reasons to build a system with Linux. We could have chosen any of the unixes such as OpenBSD, Mac OS X or GNU/Linux. We could also have chosen Windows from Microsoft. But for lots of reasons, we chose GNU/Linux.

For one thing, with many GNU utilities that build nicely on top of the Linux kernel, we can choose which pieces we need and which we don’t. For example we don’t need a file manager since Synchromesh takes care of that for us. We also don’t need a desktop environment since Synchromesh will be the only application the user is running. The fewer pieces we have in the system, the more stable and consistent an environment it is for the user.

The Unix systems from Sun, SGI and Mac (Solaris, Irix and OS X) each have their own kernel and their own versions of the various utilities. And they are generally built to be operated in a graphical environment with a specific look-and-feel. Microsoft’s Windows is similar in this regard, but they have a very different underlying system. We want to be able to tailor our underlying system to our needs. And Synchromesh should have its own look-and-feel no matter what’s underneath.

Since there are so many ways to assemble a GNU/Linux system, everyone does it a bit differently. So you’ll find linux distributions called Debian, Gentoo, Red Hat, etc. These “distro’s” also have different offshoots. One that’s quite popular right now is Ubuntu which is a Debian-based system from Canonical, LTD.

The distribution we’ve chosen is Arch Linux and it’s a system that you can easily set up on a variety hardware. But the reason we chose Arch their “keep it simple” philosophy in that it installs only the base GNU/Linux system and you have to install everything else manually. After the base install you won’t even have a working mouse. We’ve installed Arch and then added the X windowing system and a few other libraries. And the Synchromesh application of course.

So basically we’ve chosen to build Synchromesh on a simple, stable platform that’s designed to do only one thing: give you the best possible experience.