Do you want to receive Sonos-like sound and voice notifications from SmartThings but do not feel like spending several hundred dollars on Sonos? Do you have an old laptop/netbook (or any PC for that matter) gathering dust in a closet? If so, you can put it to a good use as shown in this demo:
“VLC Thing” is a custom SmartThings device driver that controls VLC media player and emulates Sonos audio player, making it possible to use Sonos smart apps to play sounds and voice (text-to-speech) notifications.
VLC is a free and open source cross-platform (Linux/MacOS/Windows) multimedia player and framework that plays most multimedia files as well as DVDs, Audio CDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols.
[Update 10/04/2014]
VLC Thing Version 1.0.0 is now available on GitHub: