NetworkedAudio

Summary

Playing audio over a network would bring Ubuntu closer to people's living rooms. A house server can hold all the media, leaving only a thin client connected to speakers. This spec proposes enabling an easy way to send sound over a typical present or future home network.

Rationale

For people with more than one computer (and this can include a Tivo, etc), it is desirable to be able to keep all the media on one machine and play it from another. There are several solutions at present, none of which is elegant and easy. NMM and polypaudio supposedly do this, but these are not finished. You can map a network drive and use a media player to index the network music repository - this duplicates the index unnecessarily, and requires a thick client. An NX session exports its audio to a special ESD daemon, but this doesn't work well: it seems to lock /dev/dsp.

For use with NX, LTSP and other thin or thick client applications, having an audio sink which streams over the network would be very useful, and doesn't seem outrageously difficult.

Use cases

  • Jack has hundreds of Gb of music files, and wants to play them on his laptop through his hifi speakers. He uses an NX session to his media server, and high quality audio is streamed back through his laptop and hifi.
  • Tina has a computer attached to her hifi. She wants to play a song on her laptop through the hifi, so she 'discovers' (via zeroconf) the audio target, and directs her laptop to use it as an audio sink.
  • Use for broadcast to a known group over the internet?

Scope

Design

There must be plenty of network audio/media protocols. Integration with gstreamer would plug the gap.

Implementation

Code

Data preservation and migration

Outstanding issues

BoF agenda and discussion

CategorySpec

NetworkedAudio (last edited 2008-08-06 16:40:22 by localhost)