It is almost a year since I bought the Google Home device for my personal use. I bought the Google mini and a alternative version of the Google Home called Insignia just because it had a watch.

My kids just looooved the thing.. it was a great incentive for them to speak English and train their vocabulary.. you know ask for musics, small tasks, ask for address and such. But what I noticed was that after a while, they kept asking the same things from memory.. it wasn’t like they were actually learning anything new. And there was no way to change the language because back then it only spoke a few languages, like french and Spanish.. but no Portuguese.

But, I just noticed that after the latest update and the app revamp , Portuguese was available. It is just easier for the kids and wife to interact with the assistant now and we are really having fun!

Another upgrade is that for some reason the network driver of the Google home devices was not so good, it kept loosing the wifi signal and we often asked for something and it replied with something like  “Sorry, there seems to have a problem with the network”. It was not showing up in Spotify as a possible device connection and a reboot would have to be done to have it available again.. now it is everywhere.. connection simply works!

At work we recently (not that recently) we purchased a HDMI encoder. The product comes with 16 HDMI inputs and outputs everything to the network to be consumed via RTSP, RTMP, HLS and more. However the bloody device doesn’t bring any embedded solution to merge all the outputs into a single screen. You have to treat it separately. Crazy, right?!

So, the solution then was to find something that would build the mosaic of the 16 outputs. I looked quickly for a opensource tool that would do that for you, but didn’t find anything useful. Then, had to go to old friend linux and its gizmos.

FFMPEG, I knew would do the job, but as always it would take some tinkering and lots or reading…I had no choice but go with it.. and to my surprise was quicker, simpler and funnier than I thought.
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