Monday, August 04, 2008

networked sound using pulseaudio/phonon

It just happened so that my machine did not have any speakers attached, my room mate had them; and we wanted to watch a movie on my 19". We tried with lamer options like ssh with X forwarding; but the bandwidth of 100mbps lan was quite not enough (the mvk video was close to HD btw). The jitter was high.

Then we realized that ssh was not made for audio/video streaming; and we started looking for audio streaming solutions.

Turns out that the new pulseauadio that ships with fedora9 can deliver networked sound, wow ! we tried the $PULSE_SERVER approach, but could not get it to work.

The config that finally worked was this one.

this is what it says -
++cut++

On the sender side simply load the RTP sender module:

pactl load-module module-rtp-send

On the reciever sides, create an RTP source:

pactl load-module module-null-sink sink_name=rtp
pactl load-module module-rtp-recv sink=rtp
pactl set-default-source rtp_monitor

Now the audio data will be available from the default source rtp_monitor.

--cut--

UPDATE : does not seem to work any more with pulseaudio 0.9.21 :(

--
prashant