We have used VirtualHere before. This time I thought it might be fun to try it for the iPlayer3 and SmartJackPro. This would involve both ColorPlay3 and QuickPlayPro. The good news is it works. I was able to upload a show to the iPlayer and output DMX from the SmartJackPro. I have not yet tried addressing a fixture via the SmartJackPro.
The remote is a Raspberry Pi 3 running Raspbian Lite Buster(2020-02-14).
The PC is running Windows 10 64-bit.
Server Side
VirtualHere has a download for ARM that runs quite well on the Pi 3 on their Linux server download page. A simple wget https://www.virtualhere.com/sites/default/files/usbserver/vhusbdarm into the folder of your choice followed by chmod +x ./vhusbdarm and sudo vhusbdarm -b and you are set on the server side.
The VirtualHere FAQ describes how to have the server setup to start as a service. The steps for a Pi are pretty straighforward: First you need to copy the server over to /usr/bin: sudo mv vhusbdarm /usr/sbin. Then you will need to create /etc/systemd/system/virtualhere.service with these contents.
[Unit]
Description=VirtualHere USB Sharing
Requires=networking.service
After=networking.service
[Service]
ExecStartPre=/bin/sh -c 'logger VirtualHere settling...;sleep 1s;logger VirtualHere settled'
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/vhusbdarm
Type=idle
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
Then the following commands will setup the service to run at boot.
systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl enable virtualhere
systemctl start virtualhere
NOTE: a license is required to 1) share more than one device with the server or 2) use the CPU optimized versions of the server or 3) sell VirtualHere with your hardware. As of April 2020 the license cost $49. The license key is tied to the hardware of the server.
Details on advanced configuration of the server can be found here.
Client Side
The client is downloaded from the VirtualHere site. There are versions for Linux, OSX and Windows. The download is a single executable file. The first run will install the VirtualHere client drivers and will require admin rights.
The documentation on running the client as a service can be found here. You can not use the client as a service unless the server has a license installed.
The client will offer to install Bonjour, it the server is not already installed, for its auto-discovery feature.
Advanced configuration information and command line parameters are described here.