Multi-room Sound Systems Even possible?

[hari]

my squeezeboxes run in perfect sync :-)

br, Hari

[colinjones]

Andrew

I agree for your purposes this could turn out to be useless, but remember that not everyone has the luxury of multi-zone or matrix systems ... and for them I think that even going from 1000-2000ms down to 20-200ms sync would be a significant improvement they would like. Plus, as I said there are other side benfits!

I have tried the broadcast/slave mode of xine-ui:

core - xine -A none -V none --broadcast-port 6789 /home/public/data/videos/file.avi

MD - xine slave://192.168.80.1:6789

But unfortunately the client side fails with a Floating Point Exception irrespective of the media file I use... dunno why. Done some searches and can't find anything for that for my hardware so I have logged a ticket with the Xine Project... hopefully they can advise.....

Could someone please give these commands a go on two of their machines to see if it is just my machines or something deeper in xine?

[darrenmason]

Hi Colin,

Works for me - but do you want the bad news?

Running one client on my back room MD, one on my lounge MD and one on my desktop in the study and they are not in sync. Probably a good half a second out.
All three are different.

Regards
Darren

[colinjones]

Darren - thanks for that, I need to get mine working too so I can experiment.... i was never implying that this would work right from the get go.... at the very least, in its basic form, xine is almost certainly using a buffer on the client end... need to work out how to manipulate that to get rid of it and allow just-in-time streaming (probably needs work on the server end as well)

[posde]

Just a small note.

During our LinuxTag 2008 adventure, some guy came to me, and asked how we achieved synchronization. And I told him, we don't.

After a bit chatting, he said, they have been trying to achieve synchronized audio for a couple of years, and still have not had success.

[totallymaxed]

Could LinuxMCE use PulseAudio sinks?  PulseAudio was incorporated into Ubuntu and implements a 'glitch-free' synchronous multi-output network sound server system.  It is the best sync for a networked sound system that I have heard.  It's still not perfect.  Just a thought.

[edit: spelling]

Hmmm... that sounds promising and definitely worth some research as Thom says.

Andrew

[totallymaxed]

Just a small note.

During our LinuxTag 2008 adventure, some guy came to me, and asked how we achieved synchronization. And I told him, we don't.

After a bit chatting, he said, they have been trying to achieve synchronized audio for a couple of years, and still have not had success.

posde - exactly!

We've posted question on this to the Squeezebox forums and they have no real solution for this issue yet either. The Sonos guys have also spent years on it and they freely admit they cannot compete with a traditional solution. This stuff is not easy in way... and it is not going to be delivered by xine alone.

Andrew

[phenigma]

Could LinuxMCE use PulseAudio sinks?  PulseAudio was incorporated into Ubuntu and implements a 'glitch-free' synchronous multi-output network sound server system.  It is the best sync for a networked sound system that I have heard.  It's still not perfect.  Just a thought.

[edit: spelling]

Hmmm... that sounds promising and definitely worth some research as Thom says.

Andrew

I've got some time in a few weeks.   I've played with it under ubuntu with gnome but not under kubuntu, I had initially been trying to get PulseAudio and mpd to play nicely on wireless routers with usb sound cards.  I'll try to set up 0810 on a few machines and see what's what.

J.

[posde]

Need some advice[...]

You might want to open a new thread, and not hijack this one