[pulseaudio-discuss] pulseaudio over wifi

[Russell Strong]

I have a theory about why I can't get pulse audio to work over wifi ( 
using tunnel ), however all my attempts to test it have not worked out 
well ( lack of understanding of the code ).

Please correct any assumptions:

1. Pulseaudio uses a small packets containing timestamps to measure the 
round trip time, i.e. the latency.
2. The packets used to transfer audio data are considerably larger than 
this.
3. Doing some experiments with ping, I see that latency changes a lot 
with packet size. See the difference with the 3 packet sizes below.
    64 bytes from brain.localnet (192.168.42.3): icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 
time=2.31 ms
    1032 bytes from brain.localnet (192.168.42.3): icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 
time=10.8 ms
    16392 bytes from brain.localnet (192.168.42.3): icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 
time=153 ms

 From this, I conclude that the measurement of latency, using a small 
packet, will not indicate the real latency.

To test this I tried to attach a dummy payload to the latency 
measurement packets, but I keep getting protocol errors where my client 
get kicked.

Ultimately I'd like to try piggybacking the latency measurements onto 
the actual audio data transfers, keep a history from which I can 
calculate the mean and standard deviation, then set the latency to mean 
+ 3*stddev.  However, that is beyond my knowledge of the code, so far.

Here is a patch showing how I tried to beef up the size of the latency 
measurement packet.  Can anyone tell me where I've gone wrong?

diff -ur ../pulseaudio-0.9.10/src/pulse/stream.c ./src/pulse/stream.c
--- ../pulseaudio-0.9.10/src/pulse/stream.c    2008-03-28 
09:29:27.000000000 +1000
+++ ./src/pulse/stream.c    2008-06-26 11:53:07.000000000 +1000
@@ -1140,6 +1140,7 @@
     pa_tagstruct *t;
     struct timeval now;
     int cidx = 0;
+    static uint8_t typical_payload[16384] = {0};
 
     pa_assert(s);
     pa_assert(PA_REFCNT_VALUE(s) >= 1);
@@ -1162,6 +1163,7 @@
             &tag);
     pa_tagstruct_putu32(t, s->channel);
     pa_tagstruct_put_timeval(t, pa_gettimeofday(&now));
+    pa_tagstruct_put_arbitrary(t, typical_payload);
 
     pa_pstream_send_tagstruct(s->context->pstream, t);
     pa_pdispatch_register_reply(s->context->pdispatch, tag, 
DEFAULT_TIMEOUT, stream_get_timing_info_callback, pa_operation_ref(o), 
(pa_free_cb_t) pa_operation_unref);



Russell Strong