Well, would you look at that!
I upgraded both my HTPC and Workstation to the latest version available to me (Beta), rebooted both PCs, started playback of a movie on the HTPC, dragged the default "Player" Zone to the Workstation's default Zone, and Zonelink worked for me... once I realised that I needed to select the correct local Zone on each PC.
I fact, with the new Precision Zone Sync feature turned on, if I paused playback on the source MC installation, the HTPC, then playback was paused on the Workstation. If I then started playback again on the Workstation so that it was out of sync with the HTPC, then started playback on the HTPC again the playback was a bit out of sync. But when I paused the HTPC again, and unpaused it, playback came back into sync.
So it looks like ZoneSync is working for video as well, as long as the video is controlled (pause/play) at the source MC installation. Or more correctly, Play/Pause just needs to be in the correct Server Zone, rather than the local Client playback Zone if the content is controlled at the Client.
This is very good.
Maybe this would have worked before I upgraded the MC installations, if I had selected the correct Zones at each PC (although I thought I had). But I did have different versions of MC on each PC, so maybe having the same version, and the latest, made a difference. There don't appear to be any relevant changes to Zone functionality since the publically available MC24.0.34 in the
Release Notes.
So Schmengie, if you can get a VPN working to your friend (i.e. OpenVPN), then MC can probably do what you want, for music and video, as long as the Linux version she is running has equivalent functionality for Zones as MC24.0.34.
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Now that I know that is working, I'm going to have to play around with Zone Groups.
PS: Note that I turned off ZoneSwitch for all the above testing. If used, and Zones are switched based on content for example (Audio vs Video), then that is going to impact the above functionality. It would need to be taken into account.