Discussion on true Multi-room Solution (continued)

[nswint]

Andrew,

great news indeed.

Now, why not replacing xine as our audio player with softsqueeze?

That way, we might get near perfect sync more easily.

I don't think that xine can perform multicast streaming.  To my knowledge only vlc and maybe mplayer can do that.

VLC could probably offer uni/multicasting of audio/video and simultaneous streaming to a mp3 that a squeezebox can tune into

[totallymaxed]

Andrew,

great news indeed.

Now, why not replacing xine as our audio player with softsqueeze?

That way, we might get near perfect sync more easily.

I don't think that xine can perform multicast streaming.  To my knowledge only vlc and maybe mplayer can do that.

VLC could probably offer uni/multicasting of audio/video and simultaneous streaming to a mp3 that a squeezebox can tune into

Posde idea is to replace the Xine for audio media playback with Softsqueeze...therefore moving all audio streaming clients to the same player software. this would automatically get us sync'd audio on the MD's and Squeezeboxes. Sounds like a very compelling proposition to me ;-)

Andrew

[bulek]

Hi,

I'm not sure how Softsqueeze could be used without GUI (but don't know it very well, so I believe there is an option of doing that)...

I'd just like to point out that Squeezeslave (different from SoftSqueeze, more command line oriented) at the moment is not a good option.

In my experience (I'm using it for second audio zone routed through Marantz receiver) that :
- every now and then you can hear a small hitch - like music freezes for a moment.
- it can crash on mono wav files (there is an option of recoding before it's played, but didn't yet figured out, how to do that properly). For instance, currently on 710, it dies on speech announcements...

I didn't test sync yet at all... I'm not sure what is relation of those two players and what part of code they share....

Regards,

Bulek.

[totallymaxed]

Hi,

I'm not sure how Softsqueeze could be used without GUI (but don't know it very well, so I believe there is an option of doing that)...

I'd just like to point out that Squeezeslave (different from SoftSqueeze, more command line oriented) at the moment is not a good option.

In my experience (I'm using it for second audio zone routed through Marantz receiver) that :
- every now and then you can hear a small hitch - like music freezes for a moment.
- it can crash on mono wav files (there is an option of recoding before it's played, but didn't yet figured out, how to do that properly). For instance, currently on 710, it dies on speech announcements...

I didn't test sync yet at all... I'm not sure what is relation of those two players and what part of code they share....

Regards,

Bulek.

Hi,

Softsqueeze will run 'headless' so that is not a problem in its own right. However Softsqueeze is written in Java so this might be an issue.

Squeezeslave 0.8 is also a possibility - thanks for the heads-up on the issues you have seen with this player.

The other possibility is to write a lightweight command line client to do the job. This might be the preferred route as it could be designed to do exactly what we require.

Anyway all of these options are being explored right now.

All the best

Andrew

[nswint]

Andrew,

great news indeed.

Now, why not replacing xine as our audio player with softsqueeze?

That way, we might get near perfect sync more easily.

I don't think that xine can perform multicast streaming.  To my knowledge only vlc and maybe mplayer can do that.

VLC could probably offer uni/multicasting of audio/video and simultaneous streaming to a mp3 that a squeezebox can tune into

Posde idea is to replace the Xine for audio media playback with Softsqueeze...therefore moving all audio streaming clients to the same player software. this would automatically get us sync'd audio on the MD's and Squeezeboxes. Sounds like a very compelling proposition to me ;-)

Andrew

How would that work?

Xine plays media and streams
-------
         | Media directors tune in to the stream
         | Squeezeboxes listen to stream via mms, rtsp, mp3?

I've been away from linuxmce for quite some time.

And yes squeezeslave works well.  I use it now to sync music from squeezecenter to my fm radios where I do not have squeezeboxes.

[posde]

Posde idea is to replace the Xine for audio media playback with Softsqueeze...therefore moving all audio streaming clients to the same player software. this would automatically get us sync'd audio on the MD's and Squeezeboxes. Sounds like a very compelling proposition to me ;-)

How would that work?

Xine plays media and streams
-------
         | Media directors tune in to the stream
         | Squeezeboxes listen to stream via mms, rtsp, mp3?

no. It would work the same way as it works with the hardware Squeezeboxes. We tell Squeezecenter to play a file on a Squeezebox (either hardware or software). Xine is not involved at all.

And yes squeezeslave works well.  I use it now to sync music from squeezecenter to my fm radios where I do not have squeezeboxes.

Good to hear.

[krys]

This might already be known, but I thought that I might mention it anyway just in case it helps spawn a good idea.

We were entertaining some guests last night at the house and I wanted to play some music, so I kick on my favorite internet stream and start listening in my home theater room. We started to move to the back patio so I go to floorplan and bounce the stream to both the home theater and the back patio. Of course they turn out to be about 1-2 sec out of sync which was annoying. So I decided to just use my internet radio scenario from the home theater, then run the same scenario from the patio (instead of just pushing the stream using the floorplan). Low and behold when I just grab the stream from both MD's it was perfectly sync'd.

So people out there who are smarter than me... how come i can grab an internet stream from multiple MD's and they be in perfect sync, but i cant grab a network stream without it being out of sync by 1-2 seconds? Surely we can figure out a way to replicate the internet radio stream but do it inside our own network....
-Krys

[Purplexus]

Anyone else notice that Pulse audio has the ability to control multiple sound cards within the same Cpu? or was I reading that wrong??  Will pulse audio be able to send multiple different streams to multiple sound cards? as well as have the ability to sync multiple streams to multiple sound cards?  Potentially this is the same thing as a Matrix Switch and essentially a switch in which I get to control the Size of it. 

My kubuntu machine has pulse audio loaded and I have a sound blaster platinum live card kicking around I'll quickly do a test and check it out.  Unfortunately I am not sure I know exactly how to get it started in Linux so someone else may also want to test this out  Someone that will know what they are doing better then I do.

[tschak909]

Guys, this isn't rocket science.

Write a media player that uses pulseaudio, have each zone as a child device of it. Use a plugin to coordinate the stream handling from the media plugin to the different zones.

-Thom

[Riggs]

As regards to the sync issue you can have the best software out there even the best hardware but remember travel distance I worked in Europe at a club known as Oceana and they wanted multi room sync and we fount out that no matter what hardware or software was used it was always sightly out of sync because of distance, think of how light travels (from the sun to say pluto we see the light on earth first before pluto) same would happen in rooms as cable gets longer or signal from the wireless router get weaker. best choice in connection would be to use optic with the same length and any left over needs to be coiled at the same distance on each cable and that is not perfect.

[bongowongo]

Here we have a crappy B&O system and in all rooms it is sync.

[Kooma]

The speed of light should not be a problem here, eh...

[Riggs]

The speed of light should not be a problem here, eh...

The speed of light was used as an example to show everything travels at a speed.

[hari]

So this is very exciting news indeed!

Andrew

I'm telling this for over a year..

br Hari

[Zaerc]

So this is very exciting news indeed!

Andrew

I'm telling this for over a year..

br Hari

Well, that post you're responding too is in fact more then a year old...