Arch Linux

Themaister

Member

From: Trondheim, Norway

Registered: 2008-07-21

Posts: 652

Website

mplayer-rsound, networked audio for mplayer made simple

Networked audio has bothered me for quite some time. As far as I searched I couldn't find any simple networked audio system, that was simple to set up. RSound tries to make it as hassle free to set up networked audio as possible. E.g. You want to see a movie on your laptop, but your laptop speakers simply won't cut it. Or the other way around, if that should be necessary. RSound consists of one simple "reference" CLI client for streaming PCM audio to an rsoundserv, which simply plays back audio sent to it. The server is multi-threaded, so multiple streams can be played back at the same time. Note that rsoundserv does not do any mixing itself, it relies on mixing support in the audio APIs used.

Watching movies with external audio using RSound (when you want seeking, pause support, etc) could be a real pain without a integrated plugin, so here it is. It's just a simple patch, so it can easily be integrated into other mplayer packages, but there is one package on the AUR:
http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=33401

The RSound server and CLI client can be found here:
http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=33101

RSound doesn't need any config file to operate, and its audio support is built in at compile time (rsound package enables alsa and oss by default). Currently supported audio backends are:
ALSA
OSS(v4)
libAO - Mostly for possibilities to use other backends than ALSA/OSS.
portaudio - Mostly for possibilities to use this on Mac OSX and Windows (cygwin)

Syntax:

mplayer -ao rsound:port=<port>:host=<server-ip> stuff.movie

rsoundserv might be invoked with these params:

--port
--backend | alsa, oss, etc
--device | e.g. /dev/dsp for OSS and hw:0,1 for ALSA, etc
--no-daemon
--verbose

The software is quite early in development, and is probably buggy under non-ideal situations (ping, network speed, etc), but under the testing I've done it works quite well.

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litemotiv

Forum Fellow

Registered: 2008-08-01

Posts: 5,026

Re: mplayer-rsound, networked audio for mplayer made simple

- snip, this must've been confusing to you -

Last edited by litemotiv (2010-03-06 20:36:55)

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