Re: Whole House Audio: Streaming

["Paul Gordon" <paul_gordon@xxxxxxx>]

>
>Someone mentioned a few days ago about using Streaming technology to
>provide
>whole house audio using PCs and 100mb ethernet across CAT5. I've been
using

I think that was me...


>several PCs to give zoned audio ie accessing a central MP3 jukebox, but
the
>reference to setting up a streaming server tweaked my curiosity.
>
>I downloaded the necessary components from Shoutcast and got a simple
>server

What did you get, and where from?

>application from analogX and within 20 minutes Bingo. The only problem
is
>although you can configure winamp on the individual PCs to access the
>streamed audio from the server, there is a significant (and different!)
>delay on each PC causing the whole house audio scenario to be
unworkable.
>

One thought just occurred to me - the players' buffer? - even with
streaming
media the player buffers a certain amount of it before it starts, so that
it
is always playing from memory, and the incoming stream is buffered into
memory. Now, 2 things strike me:

1) the players default buffer settings are probably optimised for internet
speeds - IE a reasonably large buffer.

2) on 100MB Ethernet, I would imagine you probably don't need any buffering
at all for speed limitations - 100MB is ample for "real-time"
streaming.

I wonder if it might improve if you set the stream pre-buffer size to the
absolute minimum allowed by the player? (zero if it is permitted?)


>Just wondered if anyone else had played about with this and what their
>results were ??
>

Not yet, but I plan to soon, so I'm interested to hear your results.

Cheers.

Paul G.

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