[pulseaudio-discuss] PulseAudio and Network Audio Devices

[Colin Guthrie]

Richi Plana wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-12-20 at 08:42 +0000, Colin Guthrie wrote:
>>> Now it's just a matter of making "discoverable network sound devices
>>> available locally".
>> Make sure you have avahi running and there's no firewall blocking it
>> from finding out the necessary info.
> 
> So I did everything I could think of: switched off firewalls on both
> machines, enabled every option related to exporting and importing
> devices, restarted avahi-daemon ... and I finally got something! No,
> it's not exactly a working remote setup, but I did see the remote audio
> device appear locally virtually ... for all of a second.
> 
> Now I can make the device appear by switching the option "Make
> discoverable network sound devices available locally" of and on again.
> This would make the virtual device appear temporarily then it would
> disappear. This works for both machines. It doesn't stay long enough for
> me to actually test it.
> 
> Any idea why it's so fleeting?

Well if you were using 0.9.8 I would say yes I do know, but from this
thread you appear to be using the stock 0.9.7 RH8 version right?

To explain, in 0.9.8 the tunnel module (the module that pulse will
automatically load when you have the "Make discoverable.....locally"
option selected) has a slight bug whereby it is not fully updated for
the added API signals.

You can get around this by applying two patches:
The first[1] one prevents a 0.9.8 server from issuing signals to a 0.9.7
client. The second[2] patches the module tunnel to handle some of the
0.9.8 API but for the time being also pretends to be 0.9.7. Tehncially
to just get things working, you only really need the bit of the second
patch which changes the protocol number to 11.

The whole issue revolves around the automatic suspension of access to
the device so rather than patching you can just disable the automatic
device suspension (e.g. tell pulse to hog the sound device).

See:
[1] http://www.pulseaudio.org/ticket/183
[2]
http://svn.mandriva.com/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/packages/cooker/pulseaudio/current/SOURCES/fix-tunnel-protocol.patch?view=markup

PS I'll update the 2nd patch soon to make it protocol 12 compatible, but
I've been busy doing my xmas shopping of late!

Col